Three-dimensional freehand imaging techniques are gaining wider adoption due to their ?exibility and cost ef?ciency. Typical examples for such a combination of a tracking system with an imaging device are freehand SPECT or freehand 3D ultrasound. However, the quality of the resulting image data is heavily dependent on the skill of the human operator and on the level of noise of the tracking data. The latter aspect can introduce blur or strong artifacts, which can signi?cantly hamper the interpretation of image data. Unfortunately, the most commonly used tracking systems to date, i.e. optical and electromagnetic, present a trade-off between invading the surgeon's workspace (due to line-of-sight requirements) and higher levels of noise and sensitivity due to the interference of surrounding metallic objects. In this work, we propose a novel approach for total variation regularization of data from tracking systems (which we term pose signals) based on a variational formulation in the manifold of Euclidean transformations. The performance of the proposed approach was evaluated using synthetic data as well as real ultrasound sweeps executed on both a Lego phantom and human anatomy, showing signi?cant improvement in terms of tracking data quality and compounded ultrasound images. Source code can be found at https://github.com/IFL-CAMP/pose_regularization.

This paper introduces the concept of shape signals, i.e., series of shapes which have a natural temporal or spatial ordering, as well as a variational formulation for the regularization of these signals. The proposed formulation can be seen as the shape-valued generalization of the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) functional for intensity images. We derive a variant of the classical finite-dimensional representation of Kendall, but our framework is generic in the sense that it can be combined with any shape space. This representation allows for the explicit computation of geodesics and thus facilitates the efficient numerical treatment of the variational formulation by means of the cyclic proximal point algorithm. Similar to the ROF-functional, we demonstrate experimentally that ℓ1-type penalties both for data fidelity term and regularizer perform best in regularizing shape signals. Finally, we show applications of our method to shape signals obtained from synthetic, photometric, and medical data sets.

We consider total variation (TV) minimization for manifold-valued data. We propose a cyclic proximal point algorithm and a parallel proximal point algorithm to minimize TV functionals with $\ell^p$-type data terms in the manifold case. These algorithms are based on iterative geodesic averaging which makes them easily applicable to a large class of data manifolds. As an application, we consider denoising images which take their values in a manifold. We apply our algorithms to diffusion tensor images and interferometric SAR images as well as sphere- and cylinder-valued images. For the class of Cartan--Hadamard manifolds (which includes the data space in diffusion tensor imaging) we show the convergence of the proposed TV minimizing algorithms to a global minimizer.

Locally optimal Delaunay triangulations are constructed to improve previous image approximation schemes. Our construction relies on a local optimization procedure, termed exchange. The efficient implementation of the exchange algorithm is addressed, and its complexity is discussed. The good performance of our improved image approximation is illustrated by numerical comparisons.

A new very low bit rate scalable encoding principle is presented. It is based on hierarchical triangular mesh encoding combined with triangle based DCT coding. Affine or DCT approximation is selected according to best rate distortion trade-off. In this way our coder demonstrates advantages at very low bit rates avoiding the traditional block or ringing artefacts of current DCT or wavelet based coders.