Visualization of the three-dimensional topography of the optic nerve head through a passive stereo vision model

This paper describes a system for surface recovery and visualization of the three-dimensional topography of the optic nerve head, as support of early diagnosis and follow up of glaucoma. In stereo vision, depth information is obtained from triangulation of corresponding points in a pair of stereo im ages. In this paper, the use of the cepstrum transformation as a disparity measurement technique between corresponding windows of different block sire s is described. This measurement process is embedded within a coarse-to-fin e depth-from-stereo algorithm, providing an initial range map with the dept h information encoded as gray levels. These sparse depth data are processed through a cubic B-spline interpolation technique in order to obtain a smoo ther representation. This methodology is being especially refined to be use d with medical images for clinical evaluation of some eye diseases such as open angle glaucoma, and is currently under testing for clinical evaluation and analysis of reproducibility and accuracy. (C) 1999 SPIE and IS&T. [S10 17-9909(99)01101-0].