Non‐Rigid Registration Under Isometric Deformations

We present a robust and efficient algorithm for the pairwise non‐rigid registration of partially overlapping 3D surfaces. Our approach treats non‐rigid registration as an optimization problem and solves it by alternating between correspondence and deformation optimization. Assuming approximately isometric deformations, robust correspondences are generated using a pruning mechanism based on geodesic consistency. We iteratively learn an appropriate deformation discretization from the current set of correspondences and use it to update the correspondences in the next iteration. Our algorithm is able to register partially similar point clouds that undergo large deformations, in just a few seconds. We demonstrate the potential of our algorithm in various applications such as example based articulated segmentation, and shape interpolation.     

Multiscale Active Contours

We propose a new multiscale image segmentation model, based on the active contour/snake model and the Polyakov action. The concept of scale, general issue in physics and signal processing, is introduced in the active contour model, which is a well-known image segmentation model that consists of evolving a contour in images toward the boundaries of objects. The Polyakov action, introduced in image processing by Sochen-Kimmel-Malladi in Sochen et al. (1998), provides an efficient mathematical framework to define a multiscale segmentation model because it generalizes the concept of harmonic maps embedded in higher-dimensional Riemannian manifolds such as multiscale images. Our multiscale segmentation model, unlike classical multiscale segmentations which work scale by scale to speed up the segmentation process, uses all scales simultaneously, i.e. the whole scale space, to introduce the geometry of multiscale images in the segmentation process. The extracted multiscale structures will be useful to efficiently improve the robustness and the performance of standard shape analysis techniques such as shape recognition and shape registration. Another advantage of our method is to use not only the Gaussian scale space but also many other multiscale spaces such as the Perona-Malik scale space, the curvature scale space or the Beltrami scale space. Finally, this multiscale segmentation technique is coupled with a multiscale edge detecting function based on the gradient vector flow model, which is able to extract convex and concave object boundaries independent of the initial condition. We apply our multiscale segmentation model on a synthetic image and a medical image.     

一种新的快速模糊C均值聚类图像分割算法

基于模糊C均值聚类（FCM）的图像分割是应用较为广泛的方法之一,其具有描述简洁、易于实现、分割效果好等优点,但也存在运算时间过长等问题,本文提出了一种新的快速FCM图像分割算法,该算法首先将图像数据划分成一定数量的子集,然后利用区域粗糙度标记所有子集,最后根据子集质心及其权重进行模糊聚类图像分割,仿真实验结果表明,该算法能够以保证图像分割质量为前提,大幅度提高FCM图像分割速度,故具有一定应用价值。     

Search strategies for shape regularized active contour

Nonlinear shape models have been shown to improve the robustness and flexibility of contour-based object segmentation when there are appearance ambiguities between the object and the background. In this paper, we focus on a new search strategy for the shape regularized active contour (ShRAC) model, which adopts existing nonlinear shape models to segment objects that are similar to a set of training shapes. The search for optimal contour is performed by a coarse-to-fine algorithm that iterates between combinatorial search and gradient-based local optimization. First, multi-solution dynamic programming (MSDP) is used to generate initial candidates by minimizing only the image energy. In the second step, a combination of image energy and shape energy is minimized starting from these initial candidates using a local optimization method and the best one is selected. To generate diverse initial candidates while reducing invalid shapes, we apply two pruning methods to the search space of MSDP. Our search strategy combines the advantages of global combinatorial search and local optimization, and has shown excellent robustness to local minima caused by distracting suboptimal solutions. Experimental results on segmentation of different anatomical structures using ShRAC, as well as preliminary results on human silhouette segmentation are provided.     

3D anatomical shape atlas construction using mesh quality preserved deformable models

3D anatomical shape atlas construction has been extensively studied in medical image analysis research, owing to its importance in model-based image segmentation, longitudinal studies and populational statistical analysis, etc. Among multiple steps of 3D shape atlas construction, establishing anatomical correspondences across subjects, i.e., surface registration, is probably the most critical but challenging one. Adaptive focus deformable model (AFDM) [1] was proposed to tackle this problem by exploiting cross-scale geometry characteristics of 3D anatomy surfaces. Although the effectiveness of AFDM has been proved in various studies, its performance is highly dependent on the quality of 3D surface meshes, which often degrades along with the iterations of deformable surface registration (the process of correspondence matching). In this paper, we propose a new framework for 3D anatomical shape atlas construction. Our method aims to robustly establish correspondences across different subjects and simultaneously generate high-quality surface meshes without removing shape details. Mathematically, a new energy term is embedded into the original energy function of AFDM to preserve surface mesh qualities during deformable surface matching. More specifically, we employ the Laplacian representation to encode shape details and smoothness constraints. An expectation–maximization style algorithm is designed to optimize multiple energy terms alternatively until convergence. We demonstrate the performance of our method via a set of diverse applications, including a population of sparse cardiac MRI slices with 2D labels, 3D high resolution CT cardiac images and rodent brain MRIs with multiple structures. The constructed shape atlases exhibit good mesh qualities and preserve fine shape details. The constructed shape atlases can further benefit other research topics such as segmentation and statistical analysis.     

A top-down region dividing approach for image segmentation

Histogram-based and region-based segmentation approaches have been widely used in image segmentation. Difficulties arise when we use these techniques, such as the selection of a proper threshold value for the histogram-based technique and the over-segmentation followed by the time-consuming merge processing for the region-based technique. To provide efficient algorithms that not only produce better segmentation results but also maintain low computational complexity, a novel top-down region dividing based approach is developed for image segmentation, which combines the advantages of both histogram-based and region-based approaches. Experimental results show that our algorithm can efficiently perform image segmentation without distorting the spatial structure of an image. Furthermore, two potential applications in medical image analysis are presented to show the advantages of using the proposed algorithm.     

稀疏形状先验的脑肿瘤图像分割

目的 在脑部肿瘤图像的分析过程中,准确分割出肿瘤区域对于计算机辅助脑部肿瘤疾病的诊断及治疗过程具有重要意义。然而,由于脑部图像常存在结构复杂、边界模糊、灰度不均以及肿瘤内部存在明暗区域的问题,使得肿瘤图像分割工作面临严峻挑战。为了克服上述困难,更好地实现脑部肿瘤图像分割,提出一种基于稀疏形状先验的脑肿瘤图像分割算法。方法 首先,研究脑部肿瘤图像的配准与形状描述,并以此为基础构建脑部肿瘤的稀疏形状先验约束模型;继而,将该稀疏形状先验约束模型与区域能量描述方法相结合,构建基于稀疏形状先验的能量函数;最后,对能量函数进行优化及迭代,输出脑部肿瘤区域分割结果。结果 本文使用脑胶质瘤公开数据集BraTS2017进行算法测试,本文算法的分割结果与真实数据之间的平均相似度达到93.97%,灵敏度达到91.3%,阳性预测率达到95.9%。本文算法的实验准确度较高,误判率较低,鲁棒性较强。结论 本文算法能够结合水平集方法在拓扑结构描述和稀疏表达方法在复杂形状表达方面的优势,同时由于加入了形状约束,能够有效削弱肿瘤内部明暗区域对分割结果造成的影响,从而更准确和稳定地实现脑部肿瘤图像分割。     

Self-consistent gradient flow for shape optimization

We present a model for image segmentation and describe a gradient-descent method for level-set based shape optimization. It is commonly known that gradient-descent methods converge slowly due to zig–zag movement. This can also be observed for our problem, especially when sharp edges are present in the image. We interpret this in our specific context to gain a better understanding of the involved difficulties. One way to overcome slow convergence is the use of second-order methods. For our situation, they require derivatives of the potentially noisy image data and are thus undesirable. Hence, we propose a new method that can be interpreted as a self-consistent gradient flow and does not need any derivatives of the image data. It works very well in practice and leads to a far more efficient optimization algorithm. A related idea can also be used to describe the mean-curvature flow of a mean-convex surface. For this, we formulate a mean-curvature Eikonal equation, which allows a numerical propagation of the mean-curvature flow of a surface without explicit time stepping.     

A semi-supervised fuzzy GrowCut algorithm to segment and classify regions of interest of mammographic images

According to the World Health Organization, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women. It is the second leading cause of death among women round the world, becoming the most fatal form of cancer. Despite the existence of several imaging techniques useful to aid at the diagnosis of breast cancer, x-ray mammography is still the most used and effective imaging technology. Consequently, mammographic image segmentation is a fundamental task to support image analysis and diagnosis, taking into account shape analysis of mammary lesions and their borders. However, mammogram segmentation is a very hard process, once it is highly dependent on the types of mammary tissues. The GrowCut algorithm is a relatively new method to perform general image segmentation based on the selection of just a few points inside and outside the region of interest, reaching good results at difficult segmentation cases when these points are correctly selected. In this work we present a new semi-supervised segmentation algorithm based on the modification of the GrowCut algorithm to perform automatic mammographic image segmentation once a region of interest is selected by a specialist. In our proposal, we used fuzzy Gaussian membership functions to modify the evolution rule of the original GrowCut algorithm, in order to estimate the uncertainty of a pixel being object or background. The main impact of the proposed method is the significant reduction of expert effort in the initialization of seed points of GrowCut to perform accurate segmentation, once it removes the need of selection of background seeds. Furthermore, the proposed method is robust to wrong seed positioning and can be extended to other seed based techniques. These characteristics have impact on expert and intelligent systems, once it helps to develop a segmentation method with lower required specialist knowledge, being robust and as efficient as state of the art techniques. We also constructed an automatic point selection process based on the simulated annealing optimization method, avoiding the need of human intervention. The proposed approach was qualitatively compared with other state-of-the-art segmentation techniques, considering the shape of segmented regions. In order to validate our proposal, we built an image classifier using a classical multilayer perceptron. We used Zernike moments to extract segmented image features. This analysis employed 685 mammograms from IRMA breast cancer database, using fat and fibroid tissues. Results show that the proposed technique could achieve a classification rate of 91.28% for fat tissues, evidencing the feasibility of our approach.     

F-SIFT and FUZZY-RVM based efficient multi-temporal image segmentation approach for remote sensing applications

Image segmentation plays a most important role in the remote sensing applications, for the efficient detection of the Earth surface. The main objective of the segmentation process is to modify and simplify the representation of an image into an easier form for efficient analysis. The performance of the image segmentation process reduces due to the occurrence of noise and disturbances in the image. Existing segmentation approaches suffer from the performance degradation in the segmentation accuracy owing to the quality of the acquired satellite image. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes an efficient image segmentation process for the clear view of the multi-temporal satellite image. Gaussian Filter (GF) is used for filtering the image to remove the noises present in the image. PSO-Affine based image registration is applied for the extraction of the pixel points and registration of the multi-temporal image. Removal of cloud from the image is performed to get a clear view of the image. Feature extraction is performed by using the Fast-Scale Invariant Feature Transform (F-SIFT) approach. The feature points of the image are extracted to form the cluster including six different classes such as building area, road area, vegetation area, tree area, water area and land area. The classes of the cluster are recognized by using the Fuzzy-Relevance Vector Machine (F-RVM) algorithm. The proposed approach achieves better performance in the cloud removal and efficient image segmentation.     

Multimodal image registration system for image-guided orthopaedic surgery

We present a novel multimodality image registration system for spinal surgery. The system comprises a surface-based algorithm that performs computed tomography/magnetic resonance (CT/MR) rigid registration and MR image segmentation in an iterative manner. The segmentation/registration process progressively refines the result of MR image segmentation and CT/MR registration. For MR image segmentation, we propose a method based on the double-front level set that avoids boundary leakages, prevents interference from other objects in the image, and reduces computational time by constraining the search space. In order to reduce the registration error from the misclassification of the soft tissue surrounding the bone in MR images, we propose a weighted surface-based CT/MR registration scheme. The resultant weighted surface is registered to the segmented surface of the CT image. Contours are generated from the reconstructed CT surfaces for subsequent MR image segmentation. This process iterates till convergence. The registration method achieves accuracy comparable to conventional techniques while being significantly faster. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach and its application to different anatomies.     

变精度最小平方粗糙熵的图像分割算法

图像处理是获取信息的重要途径且被广泛地应用到军事、医学和交通等重要领域,图像分割在图像处理中占有重要地位。针对图像处理分割过程中的不确定性,为获取更加精确的图像分割效果,提出变精度最小平方粗糙熵和粒子群的图像单阈值分割算法。该单阈值分割算法用变精度粗糙集表示图像,以变精度最小平方粗糙熵求解最佳分割阈值,借助粒子群优化算法提高分割效率。实验表明,该单阈值分割算法明显优于最大平均信息熵法,且说明了变精度粗糙熵能够处理图像分割过程出现的不确定性。     

MapReduce-based fast fuzzy c-means algorithm for large-scale underwater image segmentation

The research on underwater image segmentation has to deal with the rapid increasing volume of images and videos. To handle this issue, parallel computing paradigms, such as the MapReduce framework has been proven as a viable solution. Therefore, we propose a MapReduce-based fast fuzzy c-means algorithm (MRFFCM) to paralyze the segmentation of the images. In our work, we use a two-layer distribution model to group the large-scale images and adopt an iterative MapReduce process to parallelize the FFCM algorithm. A combinational segmentation way is used to improve algorithm’s efficiency. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, we develop a small Hadoop cluster to test the MRFFCM algorithm. The experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method is effective and efficient on large-scale images. When compared to the traditional non-parallel methods, our algorithm can be expected to provide a more efficient segmentation on images with at least 13% improvement. Meanwhile, with the growth of cluster size, further improvement of the algorithm performance was also achieved. Consequently, such scalability can enable our proposed method to be used effectively in oceanic research, such as in underwater data processing systems.     

2D/3D image registration on the GPU

We present a method that performs a rigid 2D/3D image registration efficiently on the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). As one main contribution of this paper, we propose an efficient method for generating realistic DRRs that are visually similar to x-ray images. Therefore, we model some of the electronic post-processes of current x-ray C-arm-systems. As another main contribution, the GPU is used to compute eight intensity-based similarity measures between the DRR and the x-ray image in parallel. A combination of these eight similarity measures is used as a new similarity measure for the optimization. We evaluated the performance and the precision of our 2D/3D image registration algorithm using two phantom models. Compared to a CPU + GPU algorithm, which calculates the similarity measures on the CPU, our GPU algorithm is between three and six times faster. In contrast to single similarity measures, our new similarity measure achieved precise and robust registration results for both phantom models.     

Branch-and-Mincut: Global Optimization for Image Segmentation with High-Level Priors

Efficient global optimization techniques such as graph cut exist for energies corresponding to binary image segmentation from low-level cues. However, introducing a high-level prior such as a shape prior or a color-distribution prior into the segmentation process typically results in an energy that is much harder to optimize. The main contribution of the paper is a new global optimization framework for a wide class of such energies. The framework is built upon two powerful techniques: graph cut and branch-and-bound. These techniques are unified through the derivation of lower bounds on the energies. Being computable via graph cut, these bounds are used to prune branches within a branch-and-bound search. We demonstrate that the new framework can compute globally optimal segmentations for a variety of segmentation scenarios in a reasonable time on a modern CPU. These scenarios include unsupervised segmentation of an object undergoing 3D pose change, category-specific shape segmentation, and the segmentation under intensity/color priors defined by Chan-Vese and GrabCut functionals.     

基于粒子群优化算法和模糊熵的多级阈值图像分割算法

针对现有阈值分割算法利用穷举搜索寻找最优阈值而造成的计算成本较大的问题,提出了一种基于粒子群优化算法和模糊熵的多级阈值图像分割算法。图像分割是图像分析中非常重要的预处理步骤,在提出的方法中,首先选择香农熵和模糊熵作为优化技术的目标函数;然后建立一种基于粒子群优化算法的多层次图像阈值分割,通过最大化香农熵或模糊熵进行图像分割。最后从图像分割数据库中选取Lena、baboon和airplane作为测试图像进行性能分析（包括鲁棒性、效率和收敛性）,并与现有的几种阈值分割算法进行比较。结果显示,提出的算法得到了更高PSNR值和更少的分类误差,证明了该算法是一种高效的多级阈值图像分割算法。     

基于FCM和图割的交互式图像分割方法

为了提高在前景和背景颜色相似情况下图像的分割效果,提出了一种基于模糊C均值聚类（FCM）和图割的交互式图像分割方法。首先,利用分水岭算法对图像进行预处理,将图像分成多个小区域,用区域代替像素点进行分析。然后,采用模糊C均值算法对用户标记的前景区域和背景区域分别进行聚类分析,挖掘用户交互所提供的隐藏信息。用未标记区域的颜色分量到前景区域及背景区域类心的最小距离表示相似能量,用未标记区域与其相邻区域的相关性表示先验能量。最后,利用最大流/最小割算法求能量函数的全局最优解。与其他方法相比,该文方法具有较好的分割性能,能从前景背景相似的图像中较精确地提取感兴趣的物体,且用户操作简单。     

Curve/surface representation and evolution using vector level sets with application to the shape-based segmentation problem

In this paper, we revisit the implicit front representation and evolution using the vector level set function (VLSF) proposed in (H. E. Abd El Munim, et al., Oct. 2005). Unlike conventional scalar level sets, this function is designed to have a vector form. The distance from any point to the nearest point on the front has components (projections) in the coordinate directions included in the vector function. This kind of representation is used to evolve closed planar curves and 3D surfaces as well. Maintaining the VLSF property as the distance projections through evolution will be considered together with a detailed derivation of the vector partial differential equation (PDE) for such evolution. A shape-based segmentation framework will be demonstrated as an application of the given implicit representation. The proposed level set function system will be used to represent shapes to give a dissimilarity measure in a variational object registration process. This kind of formulation permits us to better control the process of shape registration, which is an important part in the shape-based segmentation framework. The method depends on a set of training shapes used to build a parametric shape model. The color is taken into consideration besides the shape prior information. The shape model is fitted to the image volume by registration through an energy minimization problem. The approach overcomes the conventional methods problems like point correspondences and weighing coefficients tuning of the evolution (PDEs). It is also suitable for multidimensional data and computationally efficient. Results in 2D and 3D of real and synthetic data will demonstrate the efficiency of the framework     

A variational framework for multiregion pairwise-similarity-based image segmentation

Variational cost functions that are based on pairwise similarity between pixels can be minimized within level set framework resulting in a binary image segmentation. In this paper we extend such cost functions and address multi-region image segmentation problem by employing a multi-phase level set framework. For multi-modal images cost functions become more complicated and relatively difficult to minimize. We extend our previous work, proposed for background/foreground separation, to the segmentation of images in more than two regions. We also demonstrate an efficient implementation of the curve evolution, which reduces the computational time significantly. Finally, we validate the proposed method on the Berkeley Segmentation Data Set by comparing its performance with other segmentation techniques.     

基于GPU的遥感图像配准并行程序设计与存储优化

遥感图像配准是遥感图像应用的一个重要处理步骤.随着遥感图像数据规模与遥感图像配准算法计算复杂度的增大,遥感图像配准面临着处理速度的挑战.最近几年,GPU计算能力得到极大提升,面向通用计算领域得到了快速发展.结合GPU面向通用计算领域的优势与遥感图像配准面临的处理速度问题,研究了GPU加速处理遥感图像配准的算法.选取计算量大计算精度高的基于互信息小波分解配准算法进行GPU并行设计,提出了GPU并行设计模型;同时选取GPU程序常用面向存储级的优化策略应用于遥感图像配准GPU程序,并利用CUDA(compute unified device architecture)编程语言在nVIDIA Tesla M2050GPU上进行了实验.实验结果表明,提出的并行设计模型与面向存储级的优化策略能够很好地适用于遥感图像配准领域,最大加速比达到了19.9倍.研究表明GPU通用计算技术在遥感图像处理领域具有广阔的应用前景.