“…The images acquired using CCM usually suffer from different types of artefact (e.g., blurring, noise, specular reflections, low contrast and non-uniform illumination) which makes the accurate detection of the cell contour a challenging task (Fig.3). The main reasons for the poor quality images are related to a number of factors in the acquisition process [22][2] including: (i) saccadic eye movement during image acquisition resulting in blurred images, (ii) differences in the pressure applied between the CCM Tomocap and cornea, (iii) the spherical shape of the cornea leads to non-regular distribution of the lighting in different corneal areas. The pre-processing stage aims to address these problems.…”