Stitching method for panoramic nailfold images based on capillary
contour enhancement
Abstract
Nailfold capillaroscopy is an important means of monitoring human
health. Panoramic nailfold images improve the efficiency and accuracy of
examinations. However, the acquisition of panoramic nailfold images is
seldom studied and the problem manifests of few matching feature points
when image stitching is used for such images. Therefore, this paper
presents a method for panoramic nailfold image stitching based on
vascular contour enhancement, which first solves the problem of few
matching feature points by pre-processing the image with
contrast-constrained adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), bilateral
filtering (BF), and sharpening algorithms. The panoramic images of the
nailfold blood vessels are then successfully stitched using the fast
robust feature (SURF), fast library of approximate nearest neighbors
(FLANN) and random sample agreement (RANSAC) algorithms. The
experimental results show that the panoramic image stitched by this
paper’s algorithm has a field of view width of 7.43 mm, which improves
the efficiency and accuracy of diagnosis.