Title
Towards fully automatic object detection and segmentation
Abstract
An automatic procedure for detecting and segmenting anatomical objects in 3-D images is necessary for achieving a high level of automation in many medical applications. Since today's segmentation techniques typically rely on user input for initialization, they do not allow for a fully automatic workflow. In this work, the generalized Hough transform is used for detecting anatomical objects with well defined shape in 3-D medical images. This well-known technique has frequently been used for object detection in 2-D images and is known to be robust and reliable. However. its computational and memory requirements are generally huge, especially in case of considering 3-D images and various free transformation parameters. Our approach limits the complexity of the generalized Hough transform to a reasonable amount by (1) using object prior knowledge during the preprocessing in order to suppress unlikely regions in the image, (2) restricting the flexibility of the applied transformation to only scaling and translation, and (3) using a simple shape model which does not cover any inter-individual shape variability. Despite these limitations, the approach is demonstrated to allow for a coarse 3-D delineation of the femur, vertebra and heart in a number of experiments. Additionally it is shown that the quality of the object localization is in nearly all cases sufficient to initialize a successful segmentation using shape constrained deformable models.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1117/12.652060
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
3-D object detection,generalized Hough transform,shape model,segmentation
Computer vision,Object detection,Pattern recognition,Segmentation,Computer science,Computer data storage,Hough transform,Automation,Preprocessor,Artificial intelligence,Initialization,Workflow
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
6144
0277-786X
12
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.26
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hauke Schramm114219.94
Olivier Ecabert234626.28
Jochen Peters328425.51
Vasanth Philomin440993.18
Jürgen Weese577492.69