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Abstract: This paper presents an iterated region merging-based graph cuts algorithm which is a novel extension of the standard graph cuts algorithm. Graph cuts addresses segmentation in an optimization framework and finds a globally optimal solution to a wide class of energy functions. However, the extraction of objects in a complex background often requires a lot of user interaction. The proposed algorithm starts from the user labeled sub-graph and works iteratively to label the surrounding un-segmented regions. In each iteration, only the local neighboring regions to the labeled regions are involved in the optimization so that much interference from the far unknown regions can be significantly reduced. Meanwhile, the data models of the object and background are updated iteratively based on high confident labeled regions. The sub-graph requires less user guidance for segmentation and thus better results can be obtained under the same amount of user interaction. Experiments on benchmark datasets validated that our method yields much better segmentation results than the standard graph cuts and the Grabcut methods in either qualitative or quantitative evaluation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm to model volumetric data and other one for non-rigid registration of such models using spheres formulated in the geometric algebra framework. The proposed algorithm for modeling, as opposite to the Union of Spheres method, reduces the number of entities (spheres) used to model 3D data. Our proposal is based in marching cubes idea using, however, spheres, while the Union of Spheres uses Delaunay tetrahedrization. The non-rigid registration is accomplished in a deterministic annealing scheme. At the preprocessing stage we segment the objects of interest by a segmentation method based on texture information. This method is embedded in a region growing scheme. As our final application, we present a scheme for surgical object tracking using again geometric algebra techniques. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]