Connectivity Enhancement of Broken Structural Regions in Ultrasound Images

초음파 영상에서 끊어진 구조 영역 연결성 향상 방법

  • 서현기 (한림대학교 컴퓨터공학과) ;
  • 송혜정 (한림대학교 유비쿼터스컴퓨팅학과) ;
  • 김백섭 (한림대학교 컴퓨터공학과)
  • Received : 2010.05.26
  • Accepted : 2010.08.20
  • Published : 2010.10.15

Abstract

This paper is to propose a method to enhance the connectivity of the broken structures. The pixels to be connected are found by a decision rule which is based on the intensity and gradient information of the neighboring pixels. The intensity of the pixel, if it is decided to be filled, is increased so that the pixel together with its neighbors looks connected. The anisotropic diffusion follows to make the connected structural region look more natural. The same structure matrices have been used both to get gradient information and to decide the direction of diffusion to improve the computational speed. It has been shown by the experiments on the real ultrasound images that the broken structural regions can be connected by the proposed method.

본 논문에서는 초음파 영상에서 끊어진 구조의 연결성을 향상시키는 방법을 제안한다. 본 제안 방법은 대상 픽셀의 밝기값과 주변픽셀의 그라디언트 정보를 사용하여 연결 여부를 결정하게 된다. 끊어진 구조로 판단되어진 픽셀은 그 밝기값을 증가시켜 연관성 있는 구조로 연결시키게 된다. 이후 시각적 자연스러운 표현을 위하여 비등방성 확산 필터링을 적용하여 수행하게 된다. 연산속도의 이득을 위하여 제안하는 연결성 향상 방법의 구조행렬은 그라디언트 정보와 확산 방향을 결정하는 확산 필터의 구조행렬과 통일한 구조행렬을 사용하였다. 실험은 끊어진 구조가 나타나는 실제 초음파 영상에 대해 수행하였으며 제안된 방법에 의해 끊어진 구조가 연결되어 졌음을 확인할 수 있다.

Keywords

References

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