Swft: Subbands Wavelet For Local Features Transform Descriptor For Corneal Diseases Diagnosis

Human cornea is the front see-through shield of the eye. It refracts light onto the retina to induce vision. Therefore, any defect in the cornea may lead to vision disturbance. This deficiency is estimated by sets of topographical images measured, and assessed by an ophthalmologist. Consequently, an important priority is the early and accurate diagnosis of diseases that may affect corneal integrity through the use of machine learning algorithms. Images produced by a Pentacam device can be subjected to rotation or some distortion during acquisition; therefore, accurate diagnosis requires the use of local features in the image. Accordingly, a new algorithm called subbands wavelet for local features transform (SWFT) which is mainly based on the algorithm of a scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) has been developed. This algorithm uses wavelets as a multiresolution analysis to produce images with different scales instead of using the difference of Gaussians as in the SIFT algorithm. The experimental results on the corneal topography dataset indicate that the proposed SWFT outperforms the baseline SIFT algorithm.