FIRE: Fundus Image Registration dataset

Purpose: Retinal image registration is a useful tool for medical professionals. However, performance evaluation of registration methods has not been consistently assessed in the literature. To address that, a dataset comprised of retinal image pairs annotated with ground truth and an evaluation protocol for registration methods is proposed.Methods: The dataset is comprised by 134 retinal fundus image pairs. These pairs are classified into three categories, according to characteristics that are relevant to indicative registration applications. Such characteristics are the degree of overlap between images and the presence/absence of anatomical differences. Ground truth in the form of corresponding image points and a protocol to evaluate registration performance are provided.Results: The proposed protocol is shown to enable quantitative and comparative evaluation of retinal registration methods under a variety of conditions.Conclusion: This work enables the fair comparison of retinal registration methods. It also helps researchers to select the registration method that is most appropriate given a specific target use.