22,204 research outputs found
Refraction-corrected ray-based inversion for three-dimensional ultrasound tomography of the breast
Ultrasound Tomography has seen a revival of interest in the past decade,
especially for breast imaging, due to improvements in both ultrasound and
computing hardware. In particular, three-dimensional ultrasound tomography, a
fully tomographic method in which the medium to be imaged is surrounded by
ultrasound transducers, has become feasible. In this paper, a comprehensive
derivation and study of a robust framework for large-scale bent-ray ultrasound
tomography in 3D for a hemispherical detector array is presented. Two
ray-tracing approaches are derived and compared. More significantly, the
problem of linking the rays between emitters and receivers, which is
challenging in 3D due to the high number of degrees of freedom for the
trajectory of rays, is analysed both as a minimisation and as a root-finding
problem. The ray-linking problem is parameterised for a convex detection
surface and three robust, accurate, and efficient ray-linking algorithms are
formulated and demonstrated. To stabilise these methods, novel
adaptive-smoothing approaches are proposed that control the conditioning of the
update matrices to ensure accurate linking. The nonlinear UST problem of
estimating the sound speed was recast as a series of linearised subproblems,
each solved using the above algorithms and within a steepest descent scheme.
The whole imaging algorithm was demonstrated to be robust and accurate on
realistic data simulated using a full-wave acoustic model and an anatomical
breast phantom, and incorporating the errors due to time-of-flight picking that
would be present with measured data. This method can used to provide a
low-artefact, quantitatively accurate, 3D sound speed maps. In addition to
being useful in their own right, such 3D sound speed maps can be used to
initialise full-wave inversion methods, or as an input to photoacoustic
tomography reconstructions
Discrete spherical means of directional derivatives and Veronese maps
We describe and study geometric properties of discrete circular and spherical
means of directional derivatives of functions, as well as discrete
approximations of higher order differential operators. For an arbitrary
dimension we present a general construction for obtaining discrete spherical
means of directional derivatives. The construction is based on using the
Minkowski's existence theorem and Veronese maps. Approximating the directional
derivatives by appropriate finite differences allows one to obtain finite
difference operators with good rotation invariance properties. In particular,
we use discrete circular and spherical means to derive discrete approximations
of various linear and nonlinear first- and second-order differential operators,
including discrete Laplacians. A practical potential of our approach is
demonstrated by considering applications to nonlinear filtering of digital
images and surface curvature estimation
Weighted Mean Curvature
In image processing tasks, spatial priors are essential for robust
computations, regularization, algorithmic design and Bayesian inference. In
this paper, we introduce weighted mean curvature (WMC) as a novel image prior
and present an efficient computation scheme for its discretization in practical
image processing applications. We first demonstrate the favorable properties of
WMC, such as sampling invariance, scale invariance, and contrast invariance
with Gaussian noise model; and we show the relation of WMC to area
regularization. We further propose an efficient computation scheme for
discretized WMC, which is demonstrated herein to process over 33.2
giga-pixels/second on GPU. This scheme yields itself to a convolutional neural
network representation. Finally, WMC is evaluated on synthetic and real images,
showing its superiority quantitatively to total-variation and mean curvature.Comment: 12 page
On-Manifold Preintegration for Real-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry
Current approaches for visual-inertial odometry (VIO) are able to attain
highly accurate state estimation via nonlinear optimization. However, real-time
optimization quickly becomes infeasible as the trajectory grows over time, this
problem is further emphasized by the fact that inertial measurements come at
high rate, hence leading to fast growth of the number of variables in the
optimization. In this paper, we address this issue by preintegrating inertial
measurements between selected keyframes into single relative motion
constraints. Our first contribution is a \emph{preintegration theory} that
properly addresses the manifold structure of the rotation group. We formally
discuss the generative measurement model as well as the nature of the rotation
noise and derive the expression for the \emph{maximum a posteriori} state
estimator. Our theoretical development enables the computation of all necessary
Jacobians for the optimization and a-posteriori bias correction in analytic
form. The second contribution is to show that the preintegrated IMU model can
be seamlessly integrated into a visual-inertial pipeline under the unifying
framework of factor graphs. This enables the application of
incremental-smoothing algorithms and the use of a \emph{structureless} model
for visual measurements, which avoids optimizing over the 3D points, further
accelerating the computation. We perform an extensive evaluation of our
monocular \VIO pipeline on real and simulated datasets. The results confirm
that our modelling effort leads to accurate state estimation in real-time,
outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: 20 pages, 24 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions
on Robotics (TRO) 201
Geometrical-based algorithm for variational segmentation and smoothing of vector-valued images
An optimisation method based on a nonlinear functional is considered for segmentation and smoothing of vector-valued images. An edge-based approach is proposed to initially segment the image using geometrical properties such as metric tensor of the linearly smoothed image. The nonlinear functional is then minimised for each segmented region to yield the smoothed image. The functional is characterised with a unique solution in contrast with the MumfordâShah functional for vector-valued images. An operator for edge detection is introduced as a result of this unique solution. This operator is analytically calculated and its detection performance and localisation are then compared with those of the DroGoperator. The implementations are applied on colour images as examples of vector-valued images, and the results demonstrate robust performance in noisy environments
Locally Orderless Registration
Image registration is an important tool for medical image analysis and is
used to bring images into the same reference frame by warping the coordinate
field of one image, such that some similarity measure is minimized. We study
similarity in image registration in the context of Locally Orderless Images
(LOI), which is the natural way to study density estimates and reveals the 3
fundamental scales: the measurement scale, the intensity scale, and the
integration scale.
This paper has three main contributions: Firstly, we rephrase a large set of
popular similarity measures into a common framework, which we refer to as
Locally Orderless Registration, and which makes full use of the features of
local histograms. Secondly, we extend the theoretical understanding of the
local histograms. Thirdly, we use our framework to compare two state-of-the-art
intensity density estimators for image registration: The Parzen Window (PW) and
the Generalized Partial Volume (GPV), and we demonstrate their differences on a
popular similarity measure, Normalized Mutual Information (NMI).
We conclude, that complicated similarity measures such as NMI may be
evaluated almost as fast as simple measures such as Sum of Squared Distances
(SSD) regardless of the choice of PW and GPV. Also, GPV is an asymmetric
measure, and PW is our preferred choice.Comment: submitte
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