Journal Staff

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, SCIA 2013, held in Espoo, Finland, in June 2013. The 67 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 132 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on feature extraction and segmentation, pattern recognition and machine learning, medical and biomedical image analysis, faces and gestures, object and scene recognition, matching, registration, and alignment, 3D vision, color and multispectral image analysis, motion analysis, systems and applications, human-centered computing, and video and multimedia analysis

Segmentation of nerve bundles and ganglia in spine MRI using particle filters

14th International Conference, Toronto, Canada, September 18-22, 2011, Proceedings, Part IIIAutomatic segmentation of spinal nerve bundles that originate within the dural sac and exit the spinal canal is important for diagnosis and surgical planning. The variability in intensity, contrast, shape and direction of nerves seen in high resolution myelographic MR images makes segmentation a challenging task. In this paper, we present an automatic tracking method for nerve segmentation based on particle filters. We develop a novel approach to particle representation and dynamics, based on Bézier splines. Moreover, we introduce a robust image likelihood model that enables delineation of nerve bundles and ganglia from the surrounding anatomical structures. We demonstrate accurate and fast nerve tracking and compare it to expert manual segmentation.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NAMIC award U54-EB005149)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER grant 0642971

Early Results in Vision-Based Map Building

Two key objectives of robot vision are autonomous navigation and mapping. Digital cameras have become relatively cheap in recent years and have appeared in a variety of consumer devices, such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). It therefore makes sense to try to build systems that use vision as their primary input instead of the more traditional sonar and infrared sensors that have been used in the past. The camera can also be used for a range of other tasks. Service robots and toys typically operate in an indoor environment but rarely have a map of their environment when they are first turned on. This paper therefore addresses the problem of vision-based mapping where a camera has deliberately been chosen as the only sensor

A segmentation and reconstruction technique for 3D vascular structures

Abstract. In the context of stroke therapy simulation, a method for the segmentation and reconstruction of human vasculature is presented and evaluated. Based on CTA scans, semi-automatic tools have been developed to reduce dataset noise, to segment using active contours, to extract the skeleton, to estimate the vessel radii and to reconstruct the associated surface. The robustness and accuracy of our technique are evaluated on a vascular phantom scanned in different orientations. The reconstructed surface is compared to a surface generated by marching cubes followed by decimation and smoothing. Experiments show that the proposed technique reaches a good balance in terms of smoothness, number of triangles, and distance error. The reconstructed surface is suitable for real-time simulation, interactive navigation and visualization.