MRI artifact cancellation due to rigid motion in the imaging plane

A post-processing technique has been developed to suppress the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) artifact arising from object planar rigid motion. In two-dimensional Fourier transform (2-DFT) MRI, rotational and translational motions of the target during magnetic resonance magnetic resonance (MR) scan respectively impose nonuniform sampling and a phase error an the collected MRI signal. The artifact correction method introduced considers the following three conditions: (1) for planar rigid motion with known parameters, a reconstruction algorithm based on bilinear interpolation and the super-position method is employed to remove the MRI artifact, (2) for planar rigid motion with known rotation angle and unknown translational motion (including an unknown rotation center), first, a super-position bilinear interpolation algorithm is used to eliminate artifact due to rotation about the center of the imaging plane, following which a phase correction algorithm is applied to reduce the remaining phase error of the MRI signal, and (3) to estimate unknown parameters of a rigid motion, a minimum energy method is proposed which utilizes the fact that planar rigid motion increases the measured energy of an ideal MR image outside the boundary of the imaging object; by using this property all unknown parameters of a typical rigid motion are accurately estimated in the presence of noise. To confirm the feasibility of employing the proposed method in a clinical setting, the technique was used to reduce unknown rigid motion artifact arising from the head movements of two volunteers.     

One-dimensional dense disparity estimation for three-dimensional reconstruction

We present a method for fully automatic three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction from a pair of weakly calibrated images in order to deal with the modeling of complex rigid scenes. A two-dimensional (2D) triangular mesh model of the scene is calculated using a two-step algorithm mixing sparse matching and dense motion estimation approaches. The 2D mesh is iteratively refined to fit any arbitrary 3D surface. At convergence, each triangular patch corresponds to the projection of a 3D plane. The proposed algorithm relies first on a dense disparity field. The dense field estimation modelized within a robust framework is constrained by the epipolar geometry. The resulting field is then segmented according to homographic models using iterative Delaunay triangulation. In association with a weak calibration and camera motion estimation algorithm, this 2D planar model is used to obtain a VRML-compatible 3D model of the scene.     

Hierarchical enhancement of motion parameters using error division

A motion estimation algorithm is proposed based on the hierarchical enhancement of motion parameters obtained by solving a planar motion model with 2D block motion vectors. The technique of dividing the parameter error allows more accurate motion parameters to be obtained for the synthesis of panoramic images     

基于光流场分析的红外图像自动配准方法研究

提出了一种基于光流场分析的准确的红外图像自动配准方法．该方法可分为两个过程：先是利用全局光流场完成两幅图像背景区域的配准；其次利用由粗到细的层级匹配算法提取两幅图像中运动目标的特征点集，根据两组特征点集由最小二乘法计算出运动目标的变换参数，完成运动目标的配准．对一定研究领域的红外图像自动配准的仿真实验表明：该方法准确且对场景的运动有很好的鲁棒性．     

Visual control of vehicles using two-view geometry

This paper addresses the problem of visual control for mobile robots with nonholonomic motion constraints. The vision system consists of a fixed camera mounted on the robot and no odometry or additional sensors are used. We consider the usual framework in which the target is defined by an image taken previously at the desired position. Then, the control law drives the robot from the initial position to the desired one by processing image information extracted from the current and target images. We present a new approach consisting in a switching control law based on the two-view geometry without scene constraints. Our main contribution is that two controllers are defined and combined in the switching control law. One is based on the epipolar geometry and the other on the homography model. Both models have well-known degenerate cases or particular situations in which the corresponding control fails when used alone. Nevertheless, the designed approach takes advantage of both models avoiding the drawbacks of each one and allowing a smooth motion of the robot. Experimental evaluation is presented to show the performance of the approach.     

Magnetostatic Waves in a Normally Magnetized Waveguide Structure

In this paper, the propagation of magnetostatic waves (MSWS) in a normally magnetized low-loss ferrite slab (such as a yttrium iron garnet (YIG) slab) placed inside a waveguide is investigated theoretically. This case has never been studied before, and is analyzed here for tbe first time. A dispersion relation for the modes of propagation in terms of an infinite determinant can be obtained. With proper truncation procedures, sample numerical calculations for dispersion relations and group time delay per unit length were obtained and are presented herein. The general formulation in this paper contains all the information provided by the degenerate cases previously published. One special case of interest, i.e., that of a multilayer planar structure, is derived from our general formulation. The derivations of other special cases follow the same procedure.     

Depth from motion and optical blur with an unscented Kalman filter

Space-variantly blurred images of a scene contain valuable depth information. In this paper, our objective is to recover the 3-D structure of a scene from motion blur/optical defocus. In the proposed approach, the difference of blur between two observations is used as a cue for recovering depth, within a recursive state estimation framework. For motion blur, we use an unblurred-blurred image pair. Since the relationship between the observation and the scale factor of the point spread function associated with the depth at a point is nonlinear, we propose and develop a formulation of unscented Kalman filter for depth estimation. There are no restrictions on the shape of the blur kernel. Furthermore, within the same formulation, we address a special and challenging scenario of depth from defocus with translational jitter. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on synthetic as well as real data, and its performance is also compared with contemporary techniques.     

基于边缘特征的异质图像目标配准方法

目标检测作为计算机视觉的重要研究课题,在视频监控和智能导航方面有重要应用.图像配准技术是刚体目标检测方法之一.异质图像间目标的纹理差异极大,为此,对于目标的可见光俯视图像与机载红外摄像机观测异质图像,通过研究基于边缘特征的配准技术,实现对地面平面目标的配准检测.笔者首先通过建立机载运动摄像机空间模型,解决了红外观测图像的视角变换问题,将其换到与参考图像一致的视角,提出一种新颖的基于稳定区域轮廓合成的边缘提取方法,更好地控制异质图像的边缘提取效果,边缘特征匹配是在距离变换的基础上实现的,提出了一种基于稳定区域距离图像互相关的匹配度量准则.实验表明,算法能有效地实现异质图像间的目标配准检测.     

Preliminary study on helical CT algorithms for patient motion estimation and compensation

Helical computed tomography (helical/spiral CT) has replaced conventional CT in many clinical applications. In current helical CT, a patient is assumed to be rigid and motionless during scanning and planar projection sets are produced from raw data via longitudinal interpolation. However, rigid patient: motion is a problem in some cases (such as in the skull base and temporal bone imaging). Motion artifacts thus generated in reconstructed images can prevent accurate diagnosis. Modeling a uniform translational movement, the authors address how patient motion is ascertained and how it may be compensated. First, mismatch between adjacent fan-beam projections of the same orientation is determined via classical correlation, which is approximately proportional to the patient displacement projected onto an axis orthogonal to the central ray of the involved fan-beam. Then, the patient motion vector (the patient displacement per gantry rotation) is estimated from its projections using a least-square-root method. To suppress motion artifacts, adaptive interpolation algorithms are developed that synthesize full-scan and half-scan planar projection data sets, respectively. In the adaptive scheme, the interpolation is performed along inclined paths dependent upon the patient motion vector. The simulation results show that the patient motion vector can be accurately and reliably estimated using the authors' correlation and least-square-root algorithm, patient motion artifacts can be effectively suppressed via adaptive interpolation, and adaptive half-scan interpolation is advantageous compared with its full-scan counterpart in terms of high contrast image resolution.     

Rank estimation in 3D multibody motion segmentation

A novel technique for rank estimation in 3D multibody motion segmentation is proposed. It is based on the study of the frequency spectra of moving rigid objects and does not use or assume a prior knowledge of the objects contained in the scene (i.e. number of objects and motion). The significance of rank estimation on multibody motion segmentation results is shown by using two motion segmentation algorithms over both synthetic and real data.     

Video orbits of the projective group a simple approach tofeatureless estimation of parameters

We present direct featureless methods for estimating the eight parameters of an "exact" projective (homographic) coordinate transformation to register pairs of images, together with the application of seamlessly combining a plurality of images of the same scene, resulting in a single image (or new image sequence) of greater resolution or spatial extent. The approach is "exact" for two cases of static scenes: (1) images taken from the same location of an arbitrary three-dimensional (3-D) scene, with a camera that is free to pan, tilt, rotate about its optical axis, and zoom, or (2) images of a flat scene taken from arbitrary locations. The featureless projective approach generalizes interframe camera motion estimation methods that have previously used a camera model (which lacks the degrees of freedom to "exactly" characterize such phenomena as camera pan and tilt) and/or which have relied upon finding points of correspondence between the image frames. The featureless projective approach, which operates directly on the image pixels, is shown to be superior in accuracy and the ability to enhance the resolution. The proposed methods work well on image data collected from both good-quality and poor-quality video under a wide variety of conditions (sunny, cloudy, day, night). These new fully automatic methods are also shown to be robust to deviations from the assumptions of static scene and no parallax.     

Law of the junction for degenerate material with position-dependent band gap and electron affinity

The general density-voltage relations at the boundaries of the space-charge region of a degenerate n⁺-p junction with position-dependent band structure are derived. The results are valid for a variety of materials including graded composition semiconductors, heterojunctions, and devices with high doping.The following special cases of interest are considered: nondegenerate limit, rigid band model, uniform band structure and the classical case. The effect of carrier degeneracy in materials with parabolic uniform band structure is discussed in detail. In this case, for most junction voltages, a linear relationship is shown to exist between the actual minority carrier density and the values predicted by the classical theory. There is a significant departure from classical results. A plot for a correction factor as a function of doping is also given.     

基于子块运动补偿的运动目标检测

鱼眼相机成像视角大,获得信息丰富,在车载应用中具有广阔应用前景.本文提出了一种适用于移动单目鱼眼相机的运动目标检测方法.首先,提出一种子块运动补偿模型补偿图像背景运动,解决了现有运动补偿模型对强视差背景补偿效果不好的问题.其次,在子块运动补偿模型参数求解时,通过引入自车运动参数简化模型参数个数,并结合直接方法求解,避免了传统基于特征点匹配方法求解参数时易受误匹配特征点影响的问题.然后,针对鱼眼相机的成像形变问题,本文提出了一种三平面校正方法获取鱼眼图像的子块运动补偿图像.最后,利用鱼眼图像的子块运动补偿图像和真实拍摄图像的差异信息实现运动目标检测.多种测试场景下的实验结果表明了本文方法的有效性.     

一种基于MRF的单幅图像数据的三维重构方法研究

综合分析了常见的基于图像的三维重构方法的优缺点,提出了一种基于单张图像,采用马尔科夫随机场(MRF)推断3D位置和方向的3D重构方法。该算法首先将图片分割成多个小的区域(超像素块),并假定空间场景由许多很小的平面组成,超像素块与平面相互对应,对图像中每个超像素块求取出一组特征向量(纹理、颜色等),使用MRF模型化平面参数之间、超像素特征向量与平面参数之间的关系,采用监督学习的方式求取相关参数,求解MRF模型,并根据平面参数进行场景重建。这种算法不需对场景结构做明确的假定,因此较之以前的方法可以获得更多3D结构细节信息。用该方法对200张图片样本进行验算,样本中有60%实现了较为准确的3D重构。     

Three-dimensional motion estimation of objects for video coding

Three-dimensional (3-D) motion estimation is applied to the problem of motion compensation for video coding. We suppose that the video sequence consists of the perspective projections of a collection of rigid bodies which undergo a rototranslational motion. Motion compensation can be performed on the sequence once the shape of the objects and the motion parameters are determined. We show that the motion equations of a rigid body can be formulated as a nonlinear dynamic system whose state is represented by the motion parameters and by the scaled depths of the object feature points. An extended Kalman filter is used to estimate both the motion and the object shape parameters simultaneously. The inclusion of the shape parameters in the estimation procedure adds a set of constraints to the filter equations that appear to be essential for reliable motion estimation. Our experiments show that the proposed approach gives two advantages. First, the filter can give more reliable estimates in the presence of measurement noise in comparison with other motion estimators that separately compute motion and structure. Second, the filter can efficiently track abrupt motion changes. Moreover, the structure imposed by the model implies that the reconstructed motion is very natural as opposed to more common block-based schemes. Also, the parameterization of the model allows for a very efficient coding of the motion information     

Visual space-time geometry - A tool for perception and the imagination

Although the fundamental ideas underlying research efforts in the field of computer vision have not radically changed in the past two decades, there has been a transformation in the way work in this field is conducted. This is primarily due to the emergence of a number of tools, of both a practical and a theoretical nature. One such tool, celebrated throughout the nineties, is the geometry of visual space-time. It is known under a variety of headings, such as multiple view geometry, structure from motion, and model building. It is a mathematical theory relating multiple views (images) of a scene taken at different viewpoints to three-dimensional models of the (possibly dynamic) scene. This mathematical theory gave rise to algorithms that take as input images (or video) and provide as output a model of the scene. Such algorithms are one of the biggest successes of the field and they have many applications in other disciplines, such as graphics (image-based rendering, motion capture) and robotics (navigation). One of the difficulties, however is that the current tools cannot yet be fully automated, and they do not provide very accurate results. More research is required for automation and high precision. During the past few years we have investigated a number of basic questions underlying the structure from motion problem. Our investigations resulted in a small number of principles that characterize the problem. These principles, which give rise to automatic procedures and point to new avenues for studying the next level of the structure from motion problem, are the subject of this paper.     

Modeling and analysis of a 3-DOF Lorentz-force-driven planar motion stage for nanopositioning

This paper presents an approach to dynamic modeling and analysis of a 3-DOF Lorentz-force-driven planar motion stage for nanopositioning. The planar motion stage consists of a long stroke motor, a short stroke motor and a positioning platen. The long stroke motor is a linear motor, and the short stroke motor is a planar motor propelled by linear Lorentz forces and floated with high-stiffness air-bearings. The Lorentz-force-driven planar motion stage is regarded as two rigid bodies which are modeled by the Newtonian approach independently, then the relations of Lorentz forces with electric currents, magnetic fields, and displacements are obtained through electromagnetic analysis of the short stroke motor using 3-dimension finite element method. The frequency response functions of the planar motion stage in the moving directions are obtained by numerical simulation, which are in good agreement with those obtained experimentally. The positioning accuracy of the planar motion stage is also evaluated numerically and experimentally.     

Pattern tracking and 3-D motion reconstruction of a rigid body from a 2-D image sequence

This paper presents an integrated method to identify an object pattern from an image, and track its movement over a sequence of images. The sequence of images comes from a single perspective video source, which is capturing data from a precalibrated scene. This information is used to reconstruct the scene in three-dimension (3-D) within a virtual environment where a user can interact and manipulate the system. The steps that are performed include the following: i) Identify an object pattern from a two-dimensional perspective video source. The user outlines the region of interest (ROI) in the initial frame; the procedure builds a refined mask of the dominant object within the ROI using the morphological watershed algorithm. ii) The object pattern is tracked between frames using object matching within the mask provided by the previous and next frame, computing the motion parameters. iii) The identified object pattern is matched with a library of shapes to identify a corresponding 3-D object. iv) A virtual environment is created to reconstruct the scene in 3-D using the 3-D object and the motion parameters. This method can be applied to real-life application problems, such as traffic management and material flow congestion analysis.     

Motion detection and motion compensation for digital subtraction angiography image enhancement

For the enhancement of digital subtraction angiography (DSA) images, registration of mask and contrast image prior to subtraction is a pre-requisite. One of the main requirements of this task is that the region-of-interest used for the calculation of the registration parameters should contain the vascular structures of interest. This, however, is also one of the main problems in DSA because the contrasted vascular structures can be regarded as a distortion that makes the images to be compared dissimilar. In this paper we present a comparison between three frequently used similarity measures and histogram-based similarity measures. This reveals the advantages of the latter. The data-driven approach is especially suitable for registration of two images which are identical except for some structures visible in one but not in the other image. Based on an energy similarity measure, a motion vector field is obtained by template matching, which gives a set of homologous landmarks or control points in the mask and contrast image. A point-based registration is performed fitting the parameter of an appropriate transformation for patient motion correction. An affine and an elastic transformation are compared for an abdominal fluoroscopic scene.