Finding feasible mold parting directions using graphics hardware

We present new programmable graphics hardware accelerated algorithms to test the 2-moldability of geometric parts and assist with part redesign. These algorithms efficiently identify and graphically display undercuts as well as minimum and insufficient draft angles. Their running times grow only linearly with respect to the number of facets in the solid model, making them efficient subroutines for our algorithms that test whether a tessellated CAD model can be manufactured in a two-part mold. We have developed and implemented two such algorithms to choose candidate directions to test for 2-moldability using accessibility analysis and Gauss maps. The efficiency of these algorithms lies in the fact that they identify groups of candidate directions such that if any one direction in the group is undercut-free, all are, or if any one is not undercut-free, none are. We examine trade-offs between the algorithms' speed, accuracy, and whether they guarantee that an undercut-free direction will be found for a part if one exists.     

基于图形处理器加速的医学图像配准技术进展

针对目前医学图像配准技术无法满足临床实时性需求问题,对基于图形处理器(GPU)加速的医学图像配准技术进行综述探讨。首先对GPU通用计算进行概述,再以医学图像配准基本框架为主线,对近年来基于GPU加速的医学图像配准技术在国内外发展现状进行深入研究,并针对正电子发射型计算机断层显像(PET)和电子计算机断层扫描(CT)数据的非线性配准问题,分别基于中央处理器(CPU)和GPU平台进行配准实验,通过实验结果的对比,体现GPU加速配准技术的优越性。基于GPU加速的自由形变(FFD)和归一化互信息(NMI)结合的非线性配准方法配准后互信息值略低于CPU平台的配准结果,但其配准速度是CPU平台的12倍。基于GPU加速的配准算法在保持配准精度的基础上,配准速度都得到了很大的提升。     

Implementing lattice Boltzmann computation on graphics hardware

The Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM) is a physically-based approach that simulates the microscopic movement of fluid particles by simple, identical, and local rules. We accelerate the computation of the LBM on general-purpose graphics hardware, by grouping particle packets into 2D textures and mapping the Boltzmann equations completely to the rasterization and frame buffer operations. We apply stitching and packing to further improve the performance. In addition, we propose techniques, namely range scaling and range separation, that systematically transform variables into the range required by the graphics hardware and thus prevent overflow. Our approach can be extended to acceleration of the computation of any cellular automata model.     

An information-theoretic method for multimodality medical image registration

In this paper, an information-theoretic approach for multimodal image registration is presented. In the proposed approach, image registration is carried out by maximizing a Tsallis entropy-based divergence using a modified simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation algorithm. This divergence measure achieves its maximum value when the conditional intensity probabilities of the transformed target image given the reference image are degenerate distributions. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the registration accuracy of the proposed approach in comparison to existing entropic image alignment techniques. The feasibility of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated on medical images from magnetic resonance imaging, computer tomography, and positron emission tomography.     

基于GPU的快速三维医学图像刚性配准技术*

自动三维配准将多个图像数据映射到同一坐标系中,在医学影像分析中有广泛的应用。但现有主流三维刚性配准算法(如FLIRT)速度较慢,2563大小数据的刚性配准需要300 s左右,不能满足快速临床应用的需求。为此提出了一种基于CUDA(compute unified device architecture)架构的快速三维配准技术,利用GPU(gra-phic processing unit)并行计算实现配准中的坐标变换、线性插值和相似性测度计算。临床三维医学图像上的实验表明,该技术在保持配准精度的前提下将速度提     

一种新的自动图像配准算法

图像配准是图像处理的一个重要技术,被广泛的用于遥感图像、医学影像、视频监控等诸多领域中。提出了一种新的配准算法,首先分析两幅图像的联合直方图点集的分布情况,基于此定义了直方图点集的散度公式,并将其作为两幅图片的相似性测量。为加速参数的搜索过程,配准是在小波域内进行的,并使用Powell算法来优化搜索策略。实验证明相对于基于互信息的图像配准算法,本算法参数优化方法选择可以更灵活,时间消耗更少,噪声鲁棒性更优。     

An invariant approach for image registration in digital subtraction angiography

In modern medicine, digital subtraction angiography is a powerful technique for the visualization of blood vessels in a sequence of X-ray images. A serious problem encountered in this technique is misregistration of images due to patient motion. The resulting artifacts which arise from the misalignment of successive images in the sequence frequently reduce the diagnostic value of the images. In this paper, a new approach to the registration of digital angiographic image sequences is proposed. It is based on local similarity detection by means of template matching according to a combined invariants-based similarity measure and on thin-plate spline image warping. This technique is fully automatic and very efficient to correct for patient motion artifacts. The proposed algorithm for this technique has been successfully applied to register several clinical data sets including coronary applications. It works perfectly well for both slow and sudden motions and is both effective and fast.     

Medical image fusion: A survey of the state of the art

Medical image fusion is the process of registering and combining multiple images from single or multiple imaging modalities to improve the imaging quality and reduce randomness and redundancy in order to increase the clinical applicability of medical images for diagnosis and assessment of medical problems. Multi-modal medical image fusion algorithms and devices have shown notable achievements in improving clinical accuracy of decisions based on medical images. This review article provides a factual listing of methods and summarizes the broad scientific challenges faced in the field of medical image fusion. We characterize the medical image fusion research based on (1) the widely used image fusion methods, (2) imaging modalities, and (3) imaging of organs that are under study. This review concludes that even though there exists several open ended technological and scientific challenges, the fusion of medical images has proved to be useful for advancing the clinical reliability of using medical imaging for medical diagnostics and analysis, and is a scientific discipline that has the potential to significantly grow in the coming years.     

GPU-accelerated elastic 3D image registration for intra-surgical applications

Local motion within intra-patient biomedical images can be compensated by using elastic image registration. The application of B-spline based elastic registration during interventional treatment is seriously hampered by its considerable computation time. The graphics processing unit (GPU) can be used to accelerate the calculation of such elastic registrations by using its parallel processing power, and by employing the hardwired tri-linear interpolation capabilities in order to efficiently perform the cubic B-spline evaluation. In this article it is shown that the similarity measure and its derivatives also can be calculated on the GPU, using a two pass approach. On average a speedup factor 50 compared to a straight-forward CPU implementation was reached.     

View-dependent refinement of multiresolution meshes using programmable graphics hardware

View-dependent multiresolution rendering places a heavy load on CPU. This paper presents a new method on view-dependent refinement of multiresolution meshes by using the computation power of modern programmable graphics hardware (GPU). Two rendering passes using this method are included. During the first pass, the level of detail selection is performed in the fragment shaders. The resultant buffer from the first pass is taken as the input texture to the second rendering pass by vertex texturing, and then the node culling and triangulation can be performed in the vertex shaders. Our approach can generate adaptive meshes in real-time, and can be fully implemented on GPU. The method improves the efficiency of mesh simplification, and significantly alleviates the computing load on CPU.     

A new image registration scheme based on curvature scale space curve matching

We propose a new image registration scheme for remote sensing images. This scheme includes three steps in sequence. First, a segmentation process is performed on the input image pair. Then the boundaries of the segmented regions in two images are extracted and matched. These matched regions are called confidence regions. Finally, a non-linear optimization is performed in the matched regions only to obtain a global set of transform parameters. Experiments show that this scheme is more robust and converges faster than registration of the original image pair. We also develop a new curve-matching algorithm based on curvature scale space to facilitate the second step.     

Model-based mapping of reconfigurable image registration on FPGA platforms

Image registration is a computationally intensive application in the medical imaging domain that places stringent requirements on performance and memory management efficiency. This paper develops techniques for mapping rigid image registration applications onto configurable hardware under real-time performance constraints. Building on the framework of homogeneous parameterized dataflow, which provides an effective formal model of design and analysis of hardware and software for signal processing applications, we develop novel methods for representing and exploring the hardware design space when mapping image registration algorithms onto configurable hardware. Our techniques result in an efficient framework for trading off performance and configurable hardware resource usage based on the constraints of a given application. Based on trends that we have observed when applying these techniques, we also present a novel architecture that enables dynamically-reconfigurable image registration. This proposed architecture has the ability to tune its parallel processing structure adaptively based on relevant characteristics of the input images.

Dynamic meshing for deformable image registration

Finite element method (FEM) is commonly used for deformable image registration. However, there is no existing literature studying how the superimposed mesh structure would influence the image registration process. We study this problem in this paper, and propose a dynamic meshing strategy to generate mesh structure for image registration. To construct such a dynamic mesh during image registration, three steps are performed. Firstly, a density field that measures the importance of a pixel/voxel’s displacement to the registration process is computed. Secondly, an efficient contraction–optimization scheme is applied to compute a discrete Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation of the density field. Thirdly, the final mesh structure is constructed by its dual triangulation, with some post-processing to preserve the image boundary. In each iteration of the deformable image registration, the mesh structure is efficiently updated with GPU-based parallel implementation. We conduct experiments of the new dynamic mesh-guided registration framework on both synthetic and real medical images, and compare our results with the other state-of-the-art FEM-based image registration methods.     

高阶熵在医学图像配准中的应用研究

互信息是图像配准技术中广泛应用的一种相似性度量方法。传统的互信息方法中仅仅考虑了图像像素的灰度信息,而没有考虑像素之间的空间位置关系。因此,空间信息的缺乏导致了传统方法鲁棒性较差。在讨论了高阶熵的基本概念之后,将像素邻域均值作为高阶熵的第二维变量,由此加入空间信息。实验结果证明,该方法具有很强的抗噪声能力,能够使配准曲线更加平滑,从而避免在搜索过程中陷入局部极值。     

A new digital image registration algorithm based on the double spatial intensity gradients using pyramids

The new mathematical model for image registration is based on the double spatial intensity gradients. For high precision, the algorithm for image registration using pyramids is presented, which has a better results with the double-gradient registration than the mono-gradient registration.     

互信息医学图像配准的实时性研究

基于互信息的医学图像配准是一种高精稳健的自动配准算法,可以达到亚像素级精度且无需提取解剖特征而倍受重视,但其最大问题是速度慢,致使其不能满足临床的实时需求。在分析影响其速度因素的基础上提出一套加速方案,即采用快速粗配准来缩小互信息的搜索范围、利用非等间隔的灰度压缩来加快互信息的计算、通过混合遗传算法和单纯形算法来加快互信息的搜索。实验表明,改进后的算法在保证配准精度的前提下能显著提高配准速度。     

A multi-resolution area-based technique for automatic multi-modal image registration

To allow remotely sensed datasets to be used for data fusion, either to gain additional insight into the scene or for change detection, reliable spatial referencing is required. With modern remote sensing systems, reliable registration can be gained by applying an orbital model for spaceborne data or through the use of global positioning (GPS) and inertial navigation (INS) systems in the case of airborne data. Whilst, individually, these datasets appear well registered when compared to a second dataset from another source (e.g., optical to LiDAR or optical to radar) the resulting images may still be several pixels out of alignment. Manual registration techniques are often slow and labour intensive and although an improvement in registration is gained, there can still be some misalignment of the datasets. This paper outlines an approach for automatic image-to-image registration where a topologically regular grid of tie points was imposed within the overlapping region of the images. To ensure topological consistency, tie points were stored within a network structure inspired from Kohonen’s self-organising networks [24]. The network was used to constrain the motion of the tie points in a manner similar to Kohonen’s original method. Using multiple resolutions, through an image pyramid, the network structure was formed at each resolution level where connections between the resolution levels allowed tie point movements to be propagated within and to all levels. Experiments were carried out using a range of manually registered multi-modal remotely sensed datasets where known linear and non-linear transformations were introduced against which our algorithm’s performance was tested. For single modality tests with no introduced transformation a mean error of 0.011 pixels was identified increasing to 3.46 pixels using multi-modal image data. Following the introduction of a series of translations a mean error of 4.98 pixels was achieve across all image pairs while a mean error of 7.12 pixels was identified for a series of non-linear transformations. Experiments using optical reflectance and height data were also conducted to compare the manually and automatically produced results where it was found the automatic results out performed the manual results. Some limitations of the network data structure were identified when dealing with very large errors but overall the algorithm produced results similar to, and in some cases an improvement over, that of a manual operator. We have also positively compared our method to methods from two other software packages: ITK and ITT ENVI.     

基于非刚性配准的交互式医学图像序列分割

提出了一种新的交互式医学图像序列分割算法,该算法将非刚性配准技术和解剖先验知识相结合把图像分割问题转化为图像配准问题。首先采用Demons算法进行图像配准,用光流法计算瞬时位移,设计了一个新的停止准则使其能自适应地确定迭代次数,并将它在金字塔型的多尺度框架下实现。然后用配准得到的形变域对已精确分割的图像进行形变就能自动地获得未分割目标图像的分割结果。扩展上述过程就可实现整个图像序列分割。试验结果表明该算法用户干预少、分割速度快、分割结果准确。     

一种改进的非刚性医学图像配准算法

非刚性医学图像配准是医学影像处理和应用中重要的研究课题.对传统的基于局部仿射变换的非刚性图像配准模型进行了改进,结合图像的区域灰度信息和切比雪夫低通滤波器幅度特性提出了一种新颖的非刚性医学图像配准算法.该算法采用自适应的局部非线性正则项,比传统算法更好地保持了图像的局部细节和边缘信息,通过结合多分辨率分层细化以及由粗到细的变形技术求解策略,很好地解决了传统配准模型无法对大变形单模态图像或者存在灰度差异的多模态图像之间进行配准的问题.实验证明,该模型和算法可以很好地实现对医学图像的非刚性配准.     

黎曼流形上的多模态医学图像配准

针对传统多模态配准方法忽视图像的结构信息和像素间的空间关系,并假定灰度全局一致的前提。本文提出了一种在黎曼流形上的多模态医学图像配准算法。首先采用线性动态模型捕捉图像的高维空间的非线性结构和局部信息,然后通过参数化动态模型构造出一种李群群元,形成黎曼流形,继而将流形嵌入到高维的再生核希尔伯特空间,再在核空间上学习出相似性测度。仿真和临床数据实验结果表明本文算法在刚体配准和仿射配准精度上均优于传统互信息方法和基于邻域的相似性测度学习方法。