Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure may help to link form and funcion of the heart unraveling crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. In this work we introduce two visualization techniques based on DT-MRI streamlining able to decipher interesting properties of the architectural organization of the heart.

Abstract: Deformable models have recently been accepted as a standard technique to segment different features in facial images. Despite they give a good approximation of the salient features in a facial image, the resulting shapes of the segmentation process seem somewhat artificial with respect to the natural feature shapes. In this paper we show that active contour models (in particular, rubber snakes) give more close and natural representation of the detected feature shape. Besides, using snakes for facial segmentation frees us from the problem of determination of the numerous weigths of deformable models. Another advantage of rubber snakes is their reduced computational cost. Our experiments using rubber snakes for segmentation of facial snapshots have shown a significant improvement compared to deformable models.

Abstract: Despite the promising results of numerous applications, the hitherto proposed snake techniques share some common problems: snake attraction by spurious edge points, snake degeneration (shrinking and attening), convergence and stability of the deformation process, snake initialization and local determination of the parameters of elasticity. We argue here that these problems can be solved only when all the snake aspects are considered. The snakes proposed here implement a new potential eld and external force in order to provide a deformation convergence, attraction by both near and far edges as well as snake behaviour selective according to the edge orientation. Furthermore, we conclude that in the case of model-based seg mentation, the internal force should include structural information about the expected snake shape. Experiments using this kind of snakes for segmenting bones in complex hand radiographs show a signicant improvement.

Abstract: The problem of texture segmentation and interpretation is one of the main concerns in the field of document analysis. Graphical documents often contain areas characterized by a structural texture whose recognition allows both the document understanding, and its storage in a more compact way. In this work, we focus on structural linial textures of regular repetition contained in plan documents. Starting from an atributed graph which represents the vectorized input image, we develop a method to segment textured areas and recognize their placement rules. We wish to emphasize that the searched textures do not follow a predefined pattern. Minimal closed loops of the input graph are computed, and then hierarchically clustered. In this hierarchical clustering, a distance function between two closed loops is defined in terms of their areas difference and boundary resemblance computed by a string matching procedure. Finally it is noted that, when the texture consists of isolated primitive elements, the same method can be used after computing a Voronoi Tesselation of the input graph.