Morphologic field morphing: Contour model-guided image interpolation

An interpolation method using contours of organs as the control parameters is proposed to recover the intensity information in the physical gaps of serial cross-sectional images. In our method, contour models are used to generate the control lines required for the warping algorithm. Contour information derived from this contour model-based segmentation process is processed and used as the control parameters to warp the corresponding regions in both input images into compatible shapes. In this way, the reliability of establishing the correspondence among different segments of the same organs is improved and the intensity information for the interpolated intermediate slices can be derived more faithfully, To improve the efficiency for calculating the image warp in the field morphing process, a hierarchic decomposition process is proposed to localize the influence of each control line segment, In comparison with the existing intensity interpolation algorithms that only search for corresponding points in a small physical neighborhood, this method provides more meaningful correspondence relationships by warping regions in images into similar shapes before resampling to account for significant shape differences. Several sets of experimental result are presented to show that this method generates more realistic and less blurred interpolated images, especially when the shape difference of corresponding contours is significant. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.