3D Geometric Analysis of Tubular Objects based on Surface Normal Accumulation

This paper proposes a simple and efficient method for the reconstruction and extraction of geometric parameters from 3D tubular objects. Our method constructs an image that accumulates surface normal information, then peaks within this image are located by tracking. Finally, the positions of these are optimized to lie precisely on the tubular shape centerline. This method is very versatile, and is able to process various input data types like full or partial mesh acquired from 3D laser scans, 3D height map or discrete volumetric images. The proposed algorithm is simple to implement, contains few parameters and can be computed in linear time with respect to the number of surface faces. Since the extracted tube centerline is accurate, we are able to decompose the tube into rectilinear parts and torus-like parts. This is done with a new linear time 3D torus detection algorithm, which follows the same principle of a previous work on 2D arc circle recognition. Detailed experiments show the versatility, accuracy and robustness of our new method.Comment: in 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, Sep 2015, Genova, Italy. 201

High-performance geometric vascular modelling

Image-based high-performance geometric vascular modelling and reconstruction is an essential component of computer-assisted surgery on the diagnosis, analysis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, it is an extremely challenging task to efficiently reconstruct the accurate geometric structures of blood vessels out of medical images. For one thing, the shape of an individual section of a blood vessel is highly irregular because of the squeeze of other tissues and the deformation caused by vascular diseases. For another, a vascular system is a very complicated network of blood vessels with different types of branching structures. Although some existing vascular modelling techniques can reconstruct the geometric structure of a vascular system, they are either time-consuming or lacking sufficient accuracy. What is more, these techniques rarely consider the interior tissue of the vascular wall, which consists of complicated layered structures. As a result, it is necessary to develop a better vascular geometric modelling technique, which is not only of high performance and high accuracy in the reconstruction of vascular surfaces, but can also be used to model the interior tissue structures of the vascular walls.This research aims to develop a state-of-the-art patient-specific medical image-based geometric vascular modelling technique to solve the above problems. The main contributions of this research are:- Developed and proposed the Skeleton Marching technique to reconstruct the geometric structures of blood vessels with high performance and high accuracy. With the proposed technique, the highly complicated vascular reconstruction task is reduced to a set of simple localised geometric reconstruction tasks, which can be carried out in a parallel manner. These locally reconstructed vascular geometric segments are then combined together using shape-preserving blending operations to faithfully represent the geometric shape of the whole vascular system.- Developed and proposed the Thin Implicit Patch method to realistically model the interior geometric structures of the vascular tissues. This method allows the multi-layer interior tissue structures to be embedded inside the vascular wall to illustrate the geometric details of the blood vessel in real world

PATHWAY DETECTION AND GEOMETRICAL DESCRIPTION FROM ALS DATA IN FORESTED MOUNTANEOUS AREA

International audienceIn the last decade, airborne laser scanning (ALS) systems have become an alternative source for the acquisition of altimeter data. Compared to high resolution orthoimages, one of the main advantages of ALS is the ability of the laser beam to penetrate vegetation and reach the ground underneath. Therefore, 3D point clouds are essential data for computing Digital Terrain Models (DTM) in natural and vegetated areas. DTMs are a key product for many applications such as tree detection, flood modelling, archeology or road detection. Indeed, in forested areas, traditional image-based algorithms for road and pathway detection would partially fail due to their occlusion by the canopy cover. Thus, crucial information for forest management and fire prevention such as road width and slope would be misevaluated. This paper deals with road and pathway detection in a complex forested mountaneous area and with their geometrical parameter extraction using lidar data. Firstly, a three-step image-based methodology is proposed to detect road regions. Lidar feature orthoimages are first generated. Then, road seeds are both automatically and semi-automatically detected. And, a region growing algorithm is carried out to retrieve the full pathways from the seeds previously detected. Secondly, these pathways are vectorized using morphological tools, smoothed, and discretized. Finally, 1D sections within the lidar point cloud are successively generated for each point of the pathways to estimate more accurately road widths in 3D. We also retrieve a precise location of the pathway borders and centers, exported as vector data

Extracting 3D parametric curves from 2D images of Helical objects

Helical objects occur in medicine, biology, cosmetics, nanotechnology, and engineering. Extracting a 3D parametric curve from a 2D image of a helical object has many practical applications, in particular being able to extract metrics such as tortuosity, frequency, and pitch. We present a method that is able to straighten the image object and derive a robust 3D helical curve from peaks in the object boundary. The algorithm has a small number of stable parameters that require little tuning, and the curve is validated against both synthetic and real-world data. The results show that the extracted 3D curve comes within close Hausdorff distance to the ground truth, and has near identical tortuosity for helical objects with a circular profile. Parameter insensitivity and robustness against high levels of image noise are demonstrated thoroughly and quantitatively

Multivariate Topology Simplification

Topological simplification of scalar and vector fields is well-established as an effective method for analysing and visualising complex data sets. For multivariate (alternatively, multi-field) data, topological analysis requires simultaneous advances both mathematically and computationally. We propose a robust multivariate topology simplification method based on “lip”-pruning from the Reeb space. Mathematically, we show that the projection of the Jacobi set of multivariate data into the Reeb space produces a Jacobi structure that separates the Reeb space into simple components. We also show that the dual graph of these components gives rise to a Reeb skeleton that has properties similar to the scalar contour tree and Reeb graph, for topologically simple domains. We then introduce a range measure to give a scaling-invariant total ordering of the components or features that can be used for simplification. Computationally, we show how to compute Jacobi structure, Reeb skeleton, range and geometric measures in the Joint Contour Net (an approximation of the Reeb space) and that these can be used for visualisation similar to the contour tree or Reeb graph