# Context-Aware Optimal Transport Learning for Retinal Fundus Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07862 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07862/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Contextual Loss for Image Transformation with Non-Aligned Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02077/) (2018)
- [Neural Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12220/) (2022)
- [Evaluation of Retinal Image Quality Assessment Networks in Different Color-spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05345/) (2019)
- [Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Denoising Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02574/) (2021)
- [An Annotation-free Restoration Network for Cataractous Fundus Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07737/) (2022)
- [Degradation-invariant Enhancement of Fundus Images via Pyramid Constraint Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09606/) (2022)
- [Structure-consistent Restoration Network for Cataract Fundus Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04684/) (2022)
- [OTRE: Where Optimal Transport Guided Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Meets Regularization by Enhancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03003/) (2023)
- [Optimal Transport Guided Unsupervised Learning for Enhancing low-quality Retinal Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02991/) (2023)
- [Structure-preserving Guided Retinal Image Filtering and Its Application for Optic Disc Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06625/) (2018)
- [An Optimal Transport Perspective on Unpaired Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01116/) (2022)
- [A Generic Fundus Image Enhancement Network Boosted by Frequency Self-supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00885/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [RetinalGPT: A Retinal Clinical Preference Conversational Assistant Powered by Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03987/) (2025)
- [TPOT: Topology Preserving Optimal Transport in Retinal Fundus Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01403/) (2024)
- [Many-MobileNet: Multi-Model Augmentation for Robust Retinal Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02825/) (2024)
- [Towards Prospective Medical Image Reconstruction via Knowledge-Informed Dynamic Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17644/) (2025)
- [nnMobileNet++: Towards Efficient Hybrid Networks for Retinal Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01273/) (2025)
- [Experts-Guided Unbalanced Optimal Transport for ISP Learning from Unpaired and/or Paired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05635/) (2025)
- [VAOT: Vessel-Aware Optimal Transport for Retinal Fundus Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18763/) (2025)
- [SGW-GAN: Sliced Gromov-Wasserstein Guided GANs for Retinal Fundus Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13417/) (2026)
- [Bridging Restoration and Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Retinal Fundus Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03806/) (2026)
- [A Two-Stage Multi-Scale Attention-Based Network for Weakly Supervised Cataract Fundus Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20222/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retinal fundus photography offers a non-invasive way to diagnose and monitor a variety of retinal diseases, but is prone to inherent quality glitches arising from systemic imperfections or operator/patient-related factors. However, high-quality retinal images are crucial for carrying out accurate diagnoses and automated analyses. The fundus image enhancement is typically formulated as a distribution alignment problem, by finding a one-to-one mapping between a low-quality image and its high-quality counterpart. This paper proposes a context-informed optimal transport (OT) learning framework for tackling unpaired fundus image enhancement. In contrast to standard generative image enhancement methods, which struggle with handling contextual information (e.g., over-tampered local structures and unwanted artifacts), the proposed context-aware OT learning paradigm better preserves local structures and minimizes unwanted artifacts. Leveraging deep contextual features, we derive the proposed context-aware OT using the earth mover's distance and show that the proposed context-OT has a solid theoretical guarantee. Experimental results on a large-scale dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index, as well as two downstream tasks. The code is available at urlhttps://github.com/Retinal-Research/Contextual-OT.