A computer vision system for diagnosing scoliosis using moiré images.

For young people, scoliosis deformities are an evolving process which must be detected and treated as early as possible. The moiré technique is simple, inexpensive, not aggressive and especially convenient for detecting spinal deformations. Doctors make their diagnosis by analysing the symmetry of fringes obtained by such techniques. In this paper, we present a computer vision system for help diagnosing spinal deformations using noisy moiré images of the human back. The approach adopted in this paper consists of extracting fringe contours from moiré images, then localizing some anatomical features (the spinal column, lumbar hollow and shoulder blades) which are crucial for 3D surface generation carried out using Mota's relaxation operator. Finally, rules furnished by doctors are used to derive the kind of spinal deformation and to yield the diagnosis. The proposed system has been tested on a set of noisy moiré images, and the experimental result have shown its robustness and reliability for the recognition of most scoliosis deformities.

[1]  Karin Wall,et al.  A fast sequential method for polygonal approximation of digitized curves , 1984, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[2]  Tomaso Poggio,et al.  Computational vision and regularization theory , 1985, Nature.

[3]  Jun Shen,et al.  Optimal Filter For Edge Detection Methods And Results , 1990, ECCV.

[4]  Shin-Yee Lu,et al.  The Binary Consistency Checking Scheme and Its Applications to Seismic Horizon Detection , 1989, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[5]  Thomas C. Henderson,et al.  Arc and Path Consistency Revisited , 1986, Artif. Intell..

[6]  Tomaso A. Poggio,et al.  On Edge Detection , 1984, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[7]  Mohamed Batouche.  A knowledge based system for diagnosing spinal deformations: moire pattern analysis and interpretation , 1992, [1992] Proceedings. 11th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[8]  T Yatagai,et al.  Scanning moiré method and automatic measurement of 3-D shapes. , 1977, Applied optics.

[9]  Fernando A. Mota,et al.  A Method for the Analysis of Ambiguous Segmentations of Images , 1986, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[10]  Azriel Rosenfeld,et al.  Scene Labeling by Relaxation Operations , 1976, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[11]  Vipin Kumar,et al.  Algorithms for Constraint-Satisfaction Problems: A Survey , 1992, AI Mag..

[12]  R. Benlamri,et al.  A computer vision system for diagnosing scoliosis , 1994, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[13]  D. Meadows,et al.  Generation of surface contours by moiré patterns. , 1970, Applied optics.