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Modern digital imaging technologies, such as digital microscopy or micro-computed tomography, deliver such large amounts of 2D and 3D-image data that manual processing becomes infeasible. This leads to a need for robust, flexible and automatic image analysis tools in areas such as histology or materials science, where microstructures are being investigated (e.g. cells, fiber systems). General-purpose image processing methods can be used to analyze such microstructures. These methods usually rely on segmentation, i.e., a separation of areas of interest in digital images. As image segmentation algorithms rarely adapt well to changes in the imaging system or to different analysis problems, there is a demand for solutions that can easily be modified to analyze different microstructures, and that are more accurate than existing ones. To address these challenges, this thesis contributes a novel statistical model for objects in images and novel algorithms for the image-based analysis of microstructures. The first contribution is a novel statistical model for the locations of objects (e.g. tumor cells) in images. This model is fully trainable and can therefore be easily adapted to many different image analysis tasks, which is demonstrated by examples from histology and materials science. Using algorithms for fitting this statistical model to images results in a method for locating multiple objects in images that is more accurate and more robust to noise and background clutter than standard methods. On simulated data at high noise levels (peak signal-to-noise ratio below 10 dB), this method achieves detection rates up to 10% above those of a watershed-based alternative algorithm. While objects like tumor cells can be described well by their coordinates in the plane, the analysis of fiber systems in composite materials, for instance, requires a fully three dimensional treatment. Therefore, the second contribution of this thesis is a novel algorithm to determine the local fiber orientation in micro-tomographic reconstructions of fiber-reinforced polymers and other fibrous materials. Using simulated data, it will be demonstrated that the local orientations obtained from this novel method are more robust to noise and fiber overlap than those computed using an established alternative gradient-based algorithm, both in 2D and 3D. The property of robustness to noise of the proposed algorithm can be explained by the fact that a low-pass filter is used to detect local orientations. But even in the absence of noise, depending on fiber curvature and density, the average local 3D-orientation estimate can be about 9° more accurate compared to that alternative gradient-based method. Implementations of that novel orientation estimation method require repeated image filtering using anisotropic Gaussian convolution filters. These filter operations, which other authors have used for adaptive image smoothing, are computationally expensive when using standard implementations. Therefore, the third contribution of this thesis is a novel optimal non-orthogonal separation of the anisotropic Gaussian convolution kernel. This result generalizes a previous one reported elsewhere, and allows for efficient implementations of the corresponding convolution operation in any dimension. In 2D and 3D, these implementations achieve an average performance gain by factors of 3.8 and 3.5, respectively, compared to a fast Fourier transform-based implementation. The contributions made by this thesis represent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, especially in the 2D-analysis of cells in histological resections, and in the 2D and 3D-analysis of fibrous materials.
Nonlinear diffusion filtering of images using the topological gradient approach to edges detection
(2007)
In this thesis, the problem of nonlinear diffusion filtering of gray-scale images is theoretically and numerically investigated. In the first part of the thesis, we derive the topological asymptotic expansion of the Mumford-Shah like functional. We show that the dominant term of this expansion can be regarded as a criterion to edges detection in an image. In the numerical part, we propose the finite volume discretization for the Catté et al. and the Weickert diffusion filter models. The proposed discretization is based on the integro-interpolation method introduced by Samarskii. The numerical schemes are derived for the case of uniform and nonuniform cell-centered grids of the computational domain \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^2\). In order to generate a nonuniform grid, the adaptive coarsening technique is proposed.
A spectral theory for constituents of macroscopically homogeneous random microstructures modeled as homogeneous random closed sets is developed and provided with a sound mathematical basis, where the spectrum obtained by Fourier methods corresponds to the angular intensity distribution of x-rays scattered by this constituent. It is shown that the fast Fourier transform applied to three-dimensional images of microstructures obtained by micro-tomography is a powerful tool of image processing. The applicability of this technique is is demonstrated in the analysis of images of porous media.
Two approaches for determining the Euler-Poincaré characteristic of a set observed on lattice points are considered in the context of image analysis { the integral geometric and the polyhedral approach. Information about the set is assumed to be available on lattice points only. In order to retain properties of the Euler number and to provide a good approximation of the true Euler number of the original set in the Euclidean space, the appropriate choice of adjacency in the lattice for the set and its background is crucial. Adjacencies are defined using tessellations of the whole space into polyhedrons. In R 3 , two new 14 adjacencies are introduced additionally to the well known 6 and 26 adjacencies. For the Euler number of a set and its complement, a consistency relation holds. Each of the pairs of adjacencies (14:1; 14:1), (14:2; 14:2), (6; 26), and (26; 6) is shown to be a pair of complementary adjacencies with respect to this relation. That is, the approximations of the Euler numbers are consistent if the set and its background (complement) are equipped with this pair of adjacencies. Furthermore, sufficient conditions for the correctness of the approximations of the Euler number are given. The analysis of selected microstructures and a simulation study illustrate how the estimated Euler number depends on the chosen adjacency. It also shows that there is not a uniquely best pair of adjacencies with respect to the estimation of the Euler number of a set in Euclidean space.