Wide field fundus camera with auto montage at a single alignment

A wide field fundus camera, comprising:

• an objective lens having a viewing axis and disposed to form a retinal image, the objective lens being a wide field aspherical lens having a field of view (FOV) of at least 60 degrees;
• an image recording device disposed to capture said retinal image of said wide field of view;
• a plurality of illumination beam projectors positioned around said viewing axis and each configured to project an illumination beam at an angle toward said objective lens;
• a mechanism of cross polarization configured between said image recording device and said plurality of illumination beam projectors to reject specular reflections of said illumination beams;
• an image display operatively coupled to the image recording device to display said retinal image from said image recording device;
• an electronic controller operatively coupled to said plurality of illumination beam projectors to provide power to each of the plurality of illumination beam projectors in a sequence to provide illumination to obtain each of a plurality of retinal images;
• and
• a montage algorithm implemented to produce a montage of said plurality of retinal images into a single image of said wide field of view;
• wherein said montage algorithm comprises processor-accessible instructions that, when executed, perform acts comprising the steps of:
• computing position of Purkinje reflections produced by said illumination beam projectors;
• computing wide field fundus camera alignment with a central axis of an eye being imaged by said wide field fundus camera using the position of said Purkinje reflections within said plurality of images;
• computing an area of each the plurality of images to be included in said single montage image and creating a sectional image digital mask for each of the plurality of images to remove scattering haze and the Purkinje reflections, determined by said wide field fundus camera alignment;
• computing a masked sectional image from each of said plurality of images by removal of an area of each of the plurality of images covered by each said sectional image digital mask;
• computing a blending of overlapping areas of each masked sectional image using at least one of camera alignment, image haze, image focus, image spatial frequencies, and image
• sharpness to preserve image detail and removing discontinuities between the plurality of images in the single image to create a seamless montage;
• and
• computing an image projection for said montage image using said wide field fundus camera alignment to minimize montage image distortion.