Analysis of line drawings based on automatically inferred grammar and its application to chest X-ray images

This paper proposes a syntactic method of analysis for line drawings, which extracts the required line drawings from the noisy ones and represents them as a set of strings. The method utilizes the generative grammar, which is inferred automatically. In the proposed method of analysis, the noise and the irregular components in the symbol string are separated and smoothed out based on syntactic information, making it possible to extract the required line drawings. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied to the extraction of the rib-center (costal) pattern from 30 thinned chest X-ray images. The result indicated the usefulness of the proposed method.