Surface representation is intrinsic to many applications in medical imaging, computer vision, and computer graphics. We present a method that is based on surface modeling by B-spline. The B-spline constructs a smooth surface that best fits a set of scattered unordered 3D range data points obtained from either a structured light system (a range finder), or from point coordinates on the external contours of a set of surface sections, as for example in histological coronal brain sections. B-spline stands as of one the most efficient surface representations. It possesses many properties such as boundedness, continuity, local shape controllability, and invariance to affine transformations that makes it very suitable and attractive for surface representation. Despite its attractive properties, however, B-spline has not been widely applied for representing a 3D scattered nonordered data set. This may be due to the problem in finding an ordering and a choice for the topological parameters of the B-spline that lead to a physically meaningful surface parameterization based on the scattered data set. The parameters needed for the B-spline surface construction, as well as finding the ordering of the data points, are calculated based on the geodesics of the surface extended Gaussian map. The set of control points is analytically calculated by solving a minimum mean square error problem for best surface fitting. For a noise immune modeling, we elect to use an approximating rather than an interpolating B-spline. We also examine ways of making the B-spline fitting technique robust to local deformation and noise.

This paper is concerned with the problem of full or partial alignment of surfaces in the presence of affine transformations, local deformation and noise. This work addresses many alignment problems in diverse areas such as face recognition, fusion of multi-modality (e.g., evoked potential and MRI) for in vivo alignment of metabolic with anatomical maps, and brain mapping. In this paper, we concentrate on brain mapping and consider the intra and inter-animal brain surface registration problems. Surface alignment is based on a set of local affine invariants derived from the set of ordered inflection point pairs that reside on the umbilical curves of the surface. These points are local intrinsic geometric surface landmarks that are sought after because they are preserved under the affine transformation. The method is illustrated for intra and inter-animal registration using 3D data sets obtained from a sequence of external contours of coronal sections.

A new approach is proposed for registering a set of histological coronal two-dimensional images of a rat brain sectional material with coronal sections of a three-dimensional brain atlas, an intrinsic step and a significant challenge to current efforts in brain mapping and multimodal fusion of experimental data. The alignment problem is based on matching external contours of the brain sections, and operates in the presence of tissue distortion and tears which are routinely encountered, and possible scale, rotation, and shear changes (the affine and weak perspective groups). It is based on a novel set of local absolute affine invariants derived from the set of ordered inflection points on the external contour represented by a cubic B-spline curve. The inflection points are local intrinsic geometric features, which are preserved under both the affine and the weak perspective transformations. The invariants are constructed from the sequence of area patches bounded by the contour and the line connecting two consecutive inflection points, and hence do make direct use of the area (volume) invariance property associated with the affine transformation. These local absolute invariants are very well suited to handle the tissue distortion and tears (occlusion problem).