A dissimilarity visualisation system for CT : Pilot study

Abstract

One of the capabilities of the human vision process when visualising images is the ability to visualise them at different levels of details. A segmentation procedure has been developed to mimic this capability of human vision process. The developed hierarchical clustering based segmentation (HCS) procedure automatically generates a hierarchy of segmented images. The hierarchy represents the continuous merging of similar, spatially adjacent or disjoint, regions as the allowable threshold value of dissimilarity between regions, for merging, is gradually increased. By the very nature of the HCS procedure a large amount of visual information is produced. A graphical user interface (GUI) was designed to present the segmentation output in an informative way for the user to view and interpret. In addition the GUI displays the original image data by optimally mapping the range of data values to the available 256 gray level values. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of the designed image visualisation system and to demonstrate some of its functionalities