Morphological image sequence processing

Abstract

We present a morphological multi-scalemethod for image sequence processing, which results in a truly coupled spatio-temporal anisotropic diffusion. The aim of the method is not to smooth the level-sets of single frames but to denoise the whole sequence while retaining geometric features such as spatial edges and highly accelerated motions. This is obtained by an anisotropic spatio-temporal level-set evolution, where the additional artificial time variable serves as the multi-scale parameter. The diffusion tensor of the evolution depends on the morphology of the sequence, given by spatial curvatures of the level-sets and the curvature of trajectories (=acceleration) in sequence-time.We discuss different regularization techniques and describe an operator splitting technique for solving the problem. Finally we compare the new method with existing multi-scale image sequence processing methodologies. © Springer-Verlag 2004.