A new cardiac motion estimation method based on a spatio-temporal frequency approach and Hough Transform

Myocardial motion analysis and quantification is of utmost importance for analyzing contractile heart abnormalities and it can be a symptom of a coronary arterial disease. A fundamental problem in processing sequences of images is the computation of the optical flow, which is an approximation to the real image motion. This paper presents a new algorithm for optical flow estimation based on a spatiotemporal-frequency (STF) approach, more specifically on the computation of the Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) and the Hough Transform (HT) of the motion sequences. Experimental results are compared with variational techniques, where it is shown that the main highlight of the STF+HT approach is its accurate and robust response to noise degradations. Results obtained in real cardiac magnetic resonance images are presented.