Multi-directional alignment method for three-dimensional optical coherence tomographic images

We propose a new alignment method for three-dimensional optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Recently, OCT devices have been developed that can capture three-dimensional tomographic images of retina non-contactly and non-invasively. However, eye movement artifacts in scanning make 3D reconstruction and 3D image processing difficult. In this paper, we propose a method to search the best position automatically by using normalized correlation in two directions (vertical and horizontal directions). This paper applied the proposed method to 7 OCT image sets (4 sets of normal retinal images and 3 sets of abnormal retinal images). The generated images by the proposed method are smoother about 11.9 % than that by the previous method.