Automatic Extraction of Urban Road Centerlines from High-Resolution Satellite Imagery Using Automatic Thresholding and Morphological Operation Method

The commercial high-resolution imaging satellite with 1 m spatial resolution IKONOS is an important data source of information for urban planning and geographical information system (GIS) applications. In this paper, a morphological method is proposed. The proposed method combines the automatic thresholding and morphological operation techniques to extract the road centerline of the urban environment. This method intends to solve urban road centerline problems, vehicle, vegetation, building etc. Based on this morphological method, an object extractor is designed to extract road networks from highly remote sensing images. Some filters are applied in this experiment such as line reconstruction and region filling techniques to connect the disconnected road segments and remove the small redundant. Finally, the thinning algorithm is used to extract the road centerline. Experiments have been conducted on a high-resolution IKONOS and QuickBird images showing the efficiency of the proposed method.

Research on Visual Detection Algorithm for Groove Feature Sizes by Means of Structured Light Projection

The visual inspection is an economical and effective method for welding. For measuring the feature sizes of grooves,a method based on line structured light is presented. Firstly,an adaptive algorithm to extract the subpixel centerline of structured light stripes is introduced to deal with the uneven width and grayscale distributions of laser stripes,which is based on the quadratic weighted grayscale centroid. By means of region-of-interest(ROI)division and image difference,an image preprocessing algorithm is developed for filtering noise and improving image quality. Furthermore,to acquire geometrical dimensions of various grooves and groove types precisely,the subpixel feature point extraction algorithm of grooves is designed. Finally, experimental results of feature size measuring show that the absolute error of measurement is 0.031—0.176 mm,and the relative error of measurement is 0.2%—3.6%.

Semi-automated carotid lumen segmentation in computed tomography angiography images

Carotid artery stenosis causes narrowing of carotid lumens and may lead to brain infarction. The purpose of this study was to develop a semi-automated method of segmenting vessel walls, surrounding tissues, and more importantly, the carotid artery lumen by contrast computed tomography angiography（CTA） images and to define the severity of stenosis and present a three-dimensional model of the carotid for visual inspection. In vivo contrast CTA images of 14 patients（7 normal subjects and 7 patients undergoing endarterectomy） were analyzed using a multi-step segmentation algorithm. This method uses graph cut followed by watershed and Hessian based shortest path method in order to extract lumen boundary correctly without being corrupted in the presence of surrounding tissues.Quantitative measurements of the proposed method were compared with those of manual delineation by independent board-certified radiologists. The results were quantitatively evaluated using spatial overlap surface distance indices. A slightly strong match was shown in terms of dice similarity coefficient（DSC） = 0.87±0.08; mean surface distance（Dmsd）= 0.32±0.32; root mean squared surface distance（Drmssd） = 0.49±0.54 and maximum surface distance（Dmax）=2.14±2.08 between manual and automated segmentation of common, internal and external carotid arteries, carotid bifurcation and stenotic artery, respectively. Quantitative measurements showed that the proposed method has high potential to segment the carotid lumen and is robust to the changes of the lumen diameter and the shape of the stenosis area at the bifurcation site. The proposed method for CTA images provides a fast and reliable tool to quantify the severity of carotid artery stenosis.