In this paper, we propose to use the fingerprint valley instead of ridge for the binarization-thinning process to extract fingerprint minutiae. We first use several preprocessing steps on the binary image in order to eliminate the spurious lakes and dots, and to reduce the spurious islands, bridges, and spurs in the skeleton image. By removing all the bug pixels introduced at the thinning stage...

We present a method for estimating pose information from a single depth image given an arbitrary kinematic structure without prior training. For an arbitrary skeleton and depth image, an evolutionary algorithm is used to find the optimal kinematic configuration to explain the observed image. Results show that our approach can correctly estimate poses of 39 and 78 degree-of-freedom models from a...

In this paper, we propose a novel method for the extraction of coronary artery skeletons (centerlines) by analyzing the topographic features of coronary angiogram images. Initially, the angiogram is pre-processed for noise reduction and artery enhancement through directional morphological filtering. The topographic features of the resulting image are detected based on first and second-order ima...

Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) has been introduced with the NewTom 9000 (NIM s.r.l., Verona, Italy) in preoperative dental imaging and gained increasingly acceptance. The Siremobil Iso-C3D (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany), a mobile C-arm image amplifier for 3D imaging, is also based on CBCT. It was primarily developed for intraoperative application involving the axial and ap...

Blind image deblurring, i.e., deblurring without knowledge of the blur kernel, is a highly ill-posed problem. The problem can be solved in two parts: i) estimate a blur kernel from the blurry image, and ii) given estimated blur kernel, de-convolve blurry input to restore the target image. In this paper, by interpreting an image patch as a signal on a weighted graph, we first argue that a skelet...

We present a novel image-based technique for modeling complex unfoliaged trees. Existing tree modeling tools either require capturing a large number of views for dense 3D reconstruction or rely on user inputs and botanic rules to synthesize natural-looking tree geometry. In this paper, we focus on faithfully recovering real instead of realistically-looking tree geometry from a sparse set of ima...

This paper aims to make a graph representing an essential skeleton of a character from an image that includes a machine printed or a handwritten character using the growing neural gas (GNG) method and the relative neighborhood graph (RNG) algorithm. The visual system in our brain can recognize printed characters and handwritten characters easily, robustly, and precisely. How can our brains robu...

BACKGROUND Injury to the facial skeleton and the adjoining soft tissues is a frequently occurring condition. The main aim of this work was to assess the value of multiplanar and three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction computed tomography (CT) images obtained by using multi-detector row technology in spiral data acquisition in patients with facial skeleton injury. THE AUTHORS ATTEMPTED TO ANSWER T...

Front cover: Cover image: An embryo of a house gecko (Hemidactylus turcicus) with cartilagenous skeleton stained blue’. See A.H. Griffi ng and colleagues, ‘Ontogeny the paraphalanges derived phalanges Hemidactylus turcicus (Squamata: Gekkonidae)’, this issue.

Fractal dimension has been used to quantify the structures of a wide range of objects in biology and medicine. We measured fractal dimension of human cerebellum (CB) in magnetic resonance images of 24 healthy young subjects (12 men and 12 women). CB images were resampled to a series of image sets with different 3D resolutions. At each resolution, the skeleton of the CB white matter was obtained...