Segmentation of the bladder in computerized tomography(CT) images is an important step in radiation therapy planning of prostate cancer. We present a new segmentation scheme to automatically delineate the bladder contour in CT images with three major steps. First,we use the mean shift algorithm to obtain a clustered image containing the rough contour of the bladder,which is then extracted in the second step by applying a region-growing algorithm with the initial seed point selected from a line-by-line scanning process. The third step is to refine the bladder contour more accurately using the rolling-ball algorithm. These steps are then extended to segment the bladder volume in a slice-by-slice manner. The obtained results were compared to manual segmentation by radiation oncologists. The average values of sensitivity,specificity,positive predictive value,negative predictive value,and Hausdorff distance are 86.5%,96.3%,90.5%,96.5%,and 2.8 pixels,respectively. The results show that the bladder can be accurately segmented.
Accurate detection of moving objects is an important step in stable tracking or recognition. By using a nonparametric density estimation method over a joint domain-range representation of image pixels, the correlation between neighboring pixels can be used to achieve high levels of detection accuracy in the presence of dynamic background. However, color similarity between foreground and background will cause many foreground pixels to be misclassified. In this paper, an adaptive foreground model is exploited to detect moving objects in dynamic scenes. The foreground model provides an effective description of foreground by adaptively combining the temporal persistence and spatial coherence of moving objects. Building on the advantages of MAP-MRF (the maximum a posteriori in the Markov random field) decision framework, the proposed method performs well in addressing the challenging problem of missed detection caused by similarity in color between foreground and background pixels. Experimental results on real dynamic scenes show that the proposed method is robust and efficient.
A novel approach based on independent component analysis (ICA) for speckle filtering and target extraction of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is proposed using adaptive space separation with weighted information entropy (WIE) incorporated. First the basis and the independent components are respectively obtained by ICA technique, and WIE of the image is computed; then based on the threshold computed from function T-WIE (threshold versus weighted-information-entropy), independent components are adaptively separated and the bases are classified accordingly. Thus, the image space is separated into two subspaces: "clean" and "noise". Then, a proposed nonlinear operator ABO is applied on each component of the 'clean' subspace for further optimization. Finally, recovery image is obtained reconstructing this subspace and target is easily extracted with binarisation. Note that here T-WIE is an interpolated function based on several representative target SAR images using proposed space separation algorithm.
