Contour correspondence for serial section reconstruction: complex scenarios in palaeontology

Serial sectioning is used in a number of areas in science as a means of viewing the internal features of a threedimensional object as a set of two-dimensional images. The sections are used to recreate three-dimensional computer models of the original objects by constructing surfaces between associated contours on adjacent sections. This has become a common technique for medical imaging, but is also used in a number of areas in the earth sciences, including palaeontology. This paper addresses the correspondence problem, that of matching contours in adjacent sections prior to constructing three-dimensional surfaces between them. The lack of a successful automatic approach to this stage of the reconstruction process has until now hindered the exploitation of vector data consisting of vertices and edges, derived by digitising sectional data. A new growing algorithm is proposed that uses both spatial information from the object and user-supplied semantic information describing generic characteristics of specific types of phenomena. The algorithm has been used to direct the correspondence aspects of reconstruction in a number of sectioned palaeontological data sets. # 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.