How to recover smooth object boundaries in noisy medical images

Diagnostics in medicine is often based on analysis of medical images. Extraction of the shape of objects is one basic step for further image analysis. It consists of two steps: (i) edge detection and (ii) contour recovery based on the detected edge points. Here, the authors focus on the second step. They describe the boundary of an object by trigonometric polynomials and present a fast and robust method for the approximation of the boundary from a given set of nonuniformly distributed noisy edge points. The authors show how the proposed technique can be efficiently generalized to 3-D surface recovery. Examples from 2-D and 3-D echocardiography are given