Shape Projectors for Landmark-Based Spline Curves

We present a generic method to construct orthogonal projectors for two-dimensional landmark-based parametric spline curves. We construct vector spaces that define a geometric transformation (e.g., affine, similarity, and scaling) that is applied to a reference curve. These vector spaces contain all parametric curves up to the chosen transformation. We define the vector spaces implicitly through an orthogonal projection operator and present a theorem that characterizes the projector for landmark-based spline curves, which are popular for the user-interactive analysis of biomedical images. Finally, we show how shape priors are constructed with the spline projector and provide an example of application for the segmentation of microscopy images in biology

Landmark-Based Shape Encoding and Sparse-Dictionary Learning in the Continuous Domain

We provide a generic framework to learn shape dictionaries of landmark-based curves that are defined in the continuous domain. We first present an unbiased alignment method that involves the construction of a mean shape as well as training sets whose elements are subspaces that contain all affine transformations of the training samples. The alignment relies on orthogonal projection operators that have a closed form. We then present algorithms to learn shape dictionaries according to the structure of the data that needs to be encoded: 1) projection-based functional principal-component analysis for homogeneous data and 2) continuous-domain sparse shape encoding to learn dictionaries that contain imbalanced data, outliers, or different types of shape structures. Through parametric spline curves, we provide a detailed and exact implementation of our method. We demonstrate that it requires fewer parameters than purely discrete methods and that it is computationally more efficient and accurate. We illustrate the use of our framework for dictionary learning of structures in biomedical images as well as for shape analysis in bioimaging

Similarity-Based Shape Priors for 2D Spline Snakes

We present a new formulation of a shape space containing all continuously defined 2D spline curves up to a similarity transform of a reference shape. We are able to measure a distance between an arbitrary curve and the shape space itself. Our contribution is an explicit formula for this distance measure in the continuous domain. This allows us to define efficient snake energies based on shape-dependent prior knowledge to facilitate segmentation in bioimaging. The spline-based algorithm that we propose allows us to implement continuousdomain solutions with no additional computational cost compared to the case where curves are described by a discrete set of landmarks. The proposed implementation is freely available in the public domain