Fast and accurate snake model for object contour detection

A new scheme in which a snake model is used for object contour detection is proposed. By developing a no-search movement scheme, accepting the effective gradient vector flow field as the contracting force, and adjusting the weighting parameters automatically, an algorithm that is fast, less sensitive to initial contour conditions and accurate in approaching concave parts of an object boundary is obtained     

Watershed-presegmented snake for boundary detection and tracking of left ventricle in echocardiographic images.

In this paper, an automated method of boundary detection of the left ventricle (LV) is proposed. The method uses a watershed transform and morphological operation to locate the region containing the LV, then performs snake deformation with a multiscale directional edge map for the detection of the endocardial boundary of the LV.     

边缘检测算法在医学超声液性病变图像中的应用

医学超声液性病变图像多见数个无回声区,呈"蜂窝状",边界不清晰,为了清晰地提取医学超声液性病变图像的边缘,进一步为临床诊断提供可靠依据,在此将几种不同的边缘检测算法应用于医学超声液态病变图像中,经实验结果得出,经典的边缘检测算法不能很好地提取图像的边缘,而基于Snake模型的边缘检测算法,人为设定边缘控制点,智能动态调整曲线,获得了很好的边缘提取效果,具有很高的临床应用价值。     

Conformal Snake algorithm for contour detection

A novel and effective modification of the original Snake algorithm is proposed. The modification can improve the capability of the algorithm to detect boundaries with sharp comers or concave parts without the need to introduce external forces. The essential idea is to apply conformal mapping to transform the image so that the object boundary in the new domain can be captured by the Snake algorithm     

Automatic contour propagation in cine cardiac magnetic resonance images

We have developed a method for automatic contour propagation in cine cardiac magnetic resonance images. The method consists of a new active contour model that tries to maintain a constant contour environment by matching gray values in profiles perpendicular to the contour. Consequently, the contours should maintain a constant position with respect to neighboring anatomical structures, such that the resulting contours reflect the preferences of the user. This is particularly important in cine cardiac magnetic resonance images because local image features do not describe the desired contours near the papillary muscle. The accuracy of the propagation result is influenced by several parameters. Because the optimal setting of these parameters is application dependent, we describe how to use full factorial experiments to optimize the parameter setting. We have applied our method to cine cardiac magnetic resonance image sequences from the long axis two-chamber view, the long axis four-chamber view, and the short axis view. We performed our optimization procedure for each contour in each view. Next, we performed an extensive clinical validation of our method on 69 short axis data sets and 38 long axis data sets. In the optimal parameter setting, our propagation method proved to be fast, robust, and accurate. The resulting cardiac contours are positioned within the interobserver ranges of manual segmentation. Consequently, the resulting contours can be used to accurately determine physiological parameters such as stroke volume and ejection fraction.     

An active contour method for bone cement reconstruction from C-arm x-ray images

A novel algorithm is presented to segment and reconstruct injected bone cement from a sparse set of X-ray images acquired at arbitrary poses. The sparse X-ray multi-view active contour (SxMAC-pronounced "smack") can 1) reconstruct objects for which the background partially occludes the object in X-ray images, 2) use X-ray images acquired on a noncircular trajectory, and 3) incorporate prior computed tomography (CT) information. The algorithm's inputs are preprocessed X-ray images, their associated pose information, and prior CT, if available. The algorithm initiates automated reconstruction using visual hull computation from a sparse number of X-ray images. It then improves the accuracy of the reconstruction by optimizing a geodesic active contour. Experiments with mathematical phantoms demonstrate improvements over a conventional silhouette based approach, and a cadaver experiment demonstrates SxMAC's ability to reconstruct high contrast bone cement that has been injected into a femur and achieve sub-millimeter accuracy with four images.     

Watermark detection for noisy interpolated images

In this brief, the case where the watermark is detected in a noisy interpolated version of the originally watermarked image is investigated. Polyphase decomposition is utilized at the detection side in order to enable the flexible formation of a fused image, which is appropriate for watermark detection. The optimal fused correlator, obtained by combining information from different image components, is derived through a statistical analysis of the correlation detector properties, followed by Lagrange optimization. It is shown that it is preferable to perform detection in a fused image rather than the original image.     

Automated analysis of nerve-cell images using active contour models

The number of nerve fibers (axons) in a nerve, the axon size, and shape can all be important neuroanatomical features in understanding different aspects of nerves in the brain. However, the number of axons in a nerve is typically in the order of tens of thousands and a study of a particular aspect of the nerve often involves many nerves. Potentially meaningful studies are often prohibited by the huge number involved when manual measurements have to be employed. A method that automates the analysis of axons from electron-micrographic images is presented. It begins with a rough identification of all the axon centers by use of an elliptical Hough transform procedure. Boundaries of each axons are then extracted based on active contour model, or snakes, approach where physical properties of the axons and the given image data are used in an optimization scheme to guide the snakes to converge to axon boundaries for accurate sheath measurement. However, false axon detection is still common due to poor image quality and the presence of other irrelevant cell features, thus a conflict resolution scheme is developed to eliminate false axons to further improve the performance of detection. The developed method has been tested on a number of nerve images and its results are presented.     

Automatic detection of the boundary of the calcaneus fromultrasound parametric images using an active contour model; clinicalassessment

Presents a computerized method for automated detection of the boundary of the os calcis on in vivo ultrasound parametric images, using an active dynamic contour model. The initial contour, defined without user interaction, is an iso-contour extracted from the textural feature space. The contour is deformed through the action of internal and external forces, until stability is reached. The external forces, which characterize image features, are a combination of gray-level information and second-order textural features arising from local cooccurrence matrices. The broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA) value is then averaged within the contour obtained. The method was applied to 381 clinical images. The contour was correctly detected in the great majority of the cases. For the short-term reproducibility study, the mean coefficient of variation was equal to 1.81% for BUA values and 4.95% for areas in the detected region. Women with osteoporosis had a lower BUA than age-matched controls (p=0.0005). In healthy women, the age-related decline was -0.45 dB/MHz/yr. In the group of healthy post-menopausal women, years since menopause, weight and age were significant predictors of BUA. These results are comparable to those obtained when averaging BUA values in a small region of interest     

Adaptive pseudo dilation for gestalt edge grouping and contour detection

We consider the problem of detecting object contours in natural images. In many cases, local luminance changes turn out to be stronger in textured areas than on object contours. Therefore, local edge features, which only look at a small neighborhood of each pixel, cannot be reliable indicators of the presence of a contour, and some global analysis is needed. We introduce a new morphological operator, called adaptive pseudo-dilation (APD), which uses context dependent structuring elements in order to identify long curvilinear structure in the edge map. We show that grouping edge pixels as the connected components of the output of APD results in a good agreement with the gestalt law of good continuation. The novelty of this operator is that dilation is limited to the Voronoi cell of each edge pixel. An efficient implementation of APD is presented. The grouping algorithm is then embedded in a multithreshold contour detector. At each threshold level, small groups of edges are removed, and contours are completed by means of a generalized reconstruction from markers. The use of different thresholds makes the algorithm much less sensitive to the values of the input parameters. Both qualitative and quantitative comparison with existing approaches prove the superiority of the proposed contour detector in terms of larger amount of suppressed texture and more effective detection of low-contrast contours.     

B-spline snakes: a flexible tool for parametric contour detection

We present a novel formulation for B-spline snakes that can be used as a tool for fast and intuitive contour outlining. We start with a theoretical argument in favor of splines in the traditional formulation by showing that the optimal, curvature-constrained snake is a cubic spline, irrespective of the form of the external energy field. Unfortunately, such regularized snakes suffer from slow convergence speed because of a large number of control points, as well as from difficulties in determining the weight factors associated to the internal energies of the curve. We therefore propose an alternative formulation in which the intrinsic scale of the spline model is adjusted a priori; this leads to a reduction of the number of parameters to be optimized and eliminates the need for internal energies (i.e., the regularization term). In other words, we are now controlling the elasticity of the spline implicitly and rather intuitively by varying the spacing between the spline knots. The theory is embedded into a multiresolution formulation demonstrating improved stability in noisy image environments. Validation results are presented, comparing the traditional snake using internal energies and the proposed approach without internal energies, showing the similar performance of the latter. Several biomedical examples of applications are included to illustrate the versatility of the method.     

Variable background active contour model for computer-aided delineation of nodules in thyroid ultrasound images.

This paper presents a computer-aided approach for nodule delineation in thyroid ultrasound (US) images. The developed algorithm is based on a novel active contour model, named variable background active contour (VBAC), and incorporates the advantages of the level set region-based active contour without edges (ACWE) model, offering noise robustness and the ability to delineate multiple nodules. Unlike the classic active contour models that are sensitive in the presence of intensity inhomogeneities, the proposed VBAC model considers information of variable background regions. VBAC has been evaluated on synthetic images, as well as on real thyroid US images. From the quantification of the results, two major impacts have been derived: 1) higher average accuracy in the delineation of hypoechoic thyroid nodules, which exceeds 91%; and 2) faster convergence when compared with the ACWE model.     

Modeling for edge detection problems in blurred noisy images

The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical set up and a mathematical model for the problem of image reconstruction. The original image belongs to a family of two-dimensional (2-D) possibly discontinuous functions, but is blurred by a Gaussian point spread function introduced by the measurement device. In addition, the blurred image is corrupted by an additive noise. We propose a preprocessing of data which enhances the contribution of the signal discontinuous component over that one of the regular part, while damping down the effect of noise. In particular we suggest to convolute data with a kernel defined as the second order derivative of a Gaussian spread function. Finally, the image reconstruction is embedded in an optimal problem framework. Now convexity and compactness properties for the admissible set play a fundamental role. We provide an instance of a class of admissible sets which is relevant from an application point of view while featuring the desired properties.     

Model-based neural network for target detection in SAR images

A controversial issue in the research of mathematics of intelligence has been that of the roles of a priori knowledge versus adaptive learning. After discussing mathematical difficulties of combining a priority with adaptivity encountered in the past, we introduce a concept of a model-based neural network, whose adaptive learning is based on a priori models. Applications to target detection in SAR images are discussed. We briefly overview the SAR principles, derive relatively simple physics-based models of SAR signals, and describe model-based neural networks that utilize these models. A number of real-world application examples are presented.     

SAR图像上舰船目标检测的一种新算法

提出了一种改进的KSW算法检测SAR图像上的舰船目标.在该算法中,检测门限被选择以最大化背景与目标灰度熵加权和.由于加权系数的引入,该算法能针对SAR图像上舰船目标检测的实际情况,调整背景与目标灰度熵在准则函数中所占比例.当海杂波较弱时,该算法与传统的KSW算法等价.当海杂波较强时,其较传统的KSW算法有更好的表现.     

Equivariant holomorphic filters for contour denoising and rapid object detection.

It is well known that linear filters are not powerful enough for many low-level image processing tasks. However, it is also very difficult to design robust nonlinear filters that respond exclusively to features of interest and that are, at the same time, equivariant with respect to translation and rotation. This paper proposes a new class of rotation-equivariant nonlinear filters that is based on the principle of group integration. These filters become efficiently computable by an iterative scheme based on repeated differentiation of products and summations of intermediate results. The relations of the proposed approach to Volterra filters and steerable filters are shown. In the context of detection problems, the filter may be interpreted as some kind of generalized Hough transform. The experiments show that the new filter can be used for enhancing noisy contours and rapid object detection in microscopical images. In the detection context, our experiments show that the proposed filter is definitely superior to alternative approaches, when high localization accuracy is required.     

多时相遥感影像变化检测算法研究

本文首次将非下采样Contourlet变换和上下截集模糊Kohonen聚类网络相结合,提出了一种无监督的多时相遥感影像变化检测算法。该算法采用非下采样Contourlet变换提取与对数比图像中的每个像素相对应的多尺度和多方向纹理,并采用上下截集模糊Kohonen聚类网络将这些多尺度和多方向纹理分为变化类与未变化类两类,最终得到变化检测图像。实验结果表明,与传统方法相比,对于高斯和斑点噪声,该算法具有更高的抗噪性能和检测精确度。     

Optimal edge detection in two-dimensional images

This paper presents a new edge detection scheme that detects two-dimensional (2-D) edges by a curve-segment-based detection functional guided by the zero-crossing contours of the Laplacian-of-Gaussian (LOG) to approach the true edge locations. The detection functional is shown to be optimal in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and edge localization accuracy; it also preserves the nice scaling property held uniquely by the LOG in scale space.     

Corner detection by means of contour local vectors

A corner detection algorithm for planar shapes based on a new curvature index is proposed. The calculation parameters of this new index are adapted to the shape curvature at each point of its contour. The process consists of estimating the maximum length of contour yielding no significant discontinuities on the right and left sides of each contour point in order to calculate the contour curvature index at that point. Thus, the curvature index is adaptively filtered depending on the natural scale of the contour pixels. Corners are detected by simply thresholding the curve. The proposed method provides a more precise characterisation of the contour. Detected corners are very stable against noise distortion, scaling or rotation