Retinal image registration is important to assist diagnosis and monitor retinal diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma. However, registering retinal images for various registration applications requires the detection and distribution of feature points on the low-quality region that consists of vessels of varying contrast and sizes. A recent feature detector known as Saddle detects feature points on vessels that are poorly distributed and densely positioned on strong contrast vessels. Therefore, we propose a multiresolution difference of Gaussian pyramid with Saddle detector (D-Saddle) to detect feature points on the low-quality region that consists of vessels with varying contrast and sizes. D-Saddle is tested on Fundus Image Registration (FIRE) Dataset that consists of 134 retinal image pairs. Experimental results show that D-Saddle successfully registered 43% of retinal image pairs with average registration accuracy of 2.329 pixels while a lower success rate is observed in other four state-of-the-art retinal image registration methods GDB-ICP (28%), Harris-PIIFD (4%), H-M (16%), and Saddle (16%). Furthermore, the registration accuracy of D-Saddle has the weakest correlation (Spearman) with the intensity uniformity metric among all methods. Finally, the paired t-test shows that D-Saddle significantly improved the overall registration accuracy of the original Saddle.
A simple technique for achieving multi-wavelength tunable multi-wavelength Brillouin fiber laser (BFL) based on dual-pass configuration is demonstrated. The BFL uses a piece of 10 km long non-zero dispersion shifted fiber (NZ-DSF) as a Brillouin gain medium to obtain odd-order Brillouin Stokes waves as an output with the line spacing of 0.16 nm (20 GHz) between each two consecutive waves by employing even-order Brillouin Stokes to improve output performance of the laser. With a BP of 15.3 dBm, at least 15 odd-order Brillouin Stokes and anti-Stokes lines are generated. The laser is room temperature stable, tunable over 50 nm wavelength range and has an optical signal to noise ratio of more than 30 dB at 1560 nm region. This Brillouin fiber laser can operate at any wavelength depending on the Brillouin pump (BP) wavelength used.