Eigenspace Template Matching for Detection of Lacunar Infarcts on MR Images

Abstract Detection of lacunar infarcts is important because their presence indicates an increased risk of severe cerebral infarction. However, accurate identification is often hindered by the difficulty in distinguishing between lacunar infarcts and enlarged Virchow-Robin spaces. Therefore, we developed a computer-aided detection (CAD) scheme for the detection of lacunar infarcts. Although our previous CAD method indicated a sensitivity of 96.8 % with 0.71 false positives (FPs) per slice, further reduction of FPs remained an issue for the clinical application. Thus, the purpose of this study is to improve our CAD scheme by using template matching in the eigenspace. Conventional template matching is useful for the reduction of FPs, but it has the following two pitfalls: (1) It needs to maintain a large number of templates to improve the detection performance, and (2) calculation of the crosscorrelation coefficient with these templates is time consuming. To solve these problems, we used template matching in the lower dimension space made by a principal component analysis. Our database comprised 1,143 T 1 -and T 2 -weighted images obtained from 132 patients. The proposed method was evaluated by using twofold cross-validation. By using this method, 34.1 % of FPs was eliminated compared with our previous method. The final performance indicated that the sensitivity of the detection of lacunar infarcts was 96.8 % with 0.47 FPs per slice. Therefore, the modified CAD scheme could improve FP rate without a significant reduction in the true positive rate

A real-time low-cost vision sensor for robotic bin picking

This thesis presents an integrated approach of a vision sensor for bin picking. The vision system that has been devised consists of three major components. The first addresses the implementation of a bifocal range sensor which estimates the depth by measuring the relative blurring between two images captured with different focal settings. A key element in the success of this approach is that it overcomes some of the limitations that were associated with other related implementations and the experimental results indicate that the precision offered by the sensor discussed in this thesis is precise enough for a large variety of industrial applications. The second component deals with the implementation of an edge-based segmentation technique which is applied in order to detect the boundaries of the objects that define the scene. An important issue related to this segmentation technique consists of minimising the errors in the edge detected output, an operation that is carried out by analysing the information associated with the singular edge points. The last component addresses the object recognition and pose estimation using the information resulting from the application of the segmentation algorithm. The recognition stage consists of matching the primitives derived from the scene regions, while the pose estimation is addressed using an appearance-based approach augmented with a range data analysis. The developed system is suitable for real-time operation and in order to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach it has been examined under varying real-world scenes