Image based object locator

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-2016104290-A1
Application number	US-201514876380-A
Country	US
Kind code	A1
Filing date	Oct 6, 2015
Priority date	Oct 8, 2014
Publication date	Apr 14, 2016
Grant date	—

Abstract

Techniques, systems, and devices are disclosed for analyzing a reconstructed charged particle image of a volume of interest from charged particle detector measurements to determine a location and boundaries of one or more objects or an orientation of the one or more objects. The technique can include performing a segmentation operation on the reconstructed charged particle image of the volume. The segmentation operation identifies a subset of a set of voxels of the image of the volume as object candidate voxels. The technique can include locating corners of the one or more objects to determine the location, boundaries, or the orientation of the one or more objects. The technique can also include the computation of the center of mass of the one or more objects. The technique can include performing a morphological operation on the image and can include performing a connected-component analysis on the identified object-candidate voxels.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1 . A method for analyzing a reconstructed charged particle image of a volume from charged particle detector measurements to determine a location and boundaries of one or more objects associated with the volume, the method comprising:
performing a segmentation operation on the reconstructed charged particle image of the volume, wherein the segmentation operation identifies a subset of a set of voxels of the reconstructed charged particle image of the volume as object candidate voxels; and determine the location, boundaries and corners of the one or more objects.

2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the one or more objects include at least one container; and
wherein determining the location, boundaries and corners of the one or more objects includes determining location, boundaries and corners of the at least one container in addition to location, boundaries and corners of contents of the at least one container.

3 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the one or more objects include at least one package; and
wherein determining the location, boundaries and corners of the one or more objects includes determining location boundaries and corners of contents of the at least one package.

4 . The method of claim 1 further comprising:
performing a connected-component analysis on the identified object-candidate voxels.

5 . The method of claim 4 , further comprising:
prior to performing the connected-component analysis on the identified object-candidate voxels, performing a morphological operation on the reconstructed charged particle image.

6 . The method of claim 5 , wherein performing the morphological operation on the reconstructed charged particle image involves applying a sequence of morphological dilation operations and morphological erosion operations to the identified object-candidate voxels.

7 . The method of claim 1 , wherein performing the segmentation operation to identify the subset of the set of voxels as object-candidate voxels involves using a high threshold and a low threshold to label each voxel as either an object-candidate voxel or a non-object voxel respectively.

8 . The method of claim 1 further comprising:
locating edges of the one or more objects prior to locating the location and boundaries of the one or more objects and then the corners.

9 . The method of claim 1 further comprising:
determining a relative position of some parts of the one or more objects relative to other parts of the one or more objects.

10 . The method of claim 1 further comprising:
determining locations of the previously segmented fiducials by computing the center of mass of each fiducial and computing the center of mass of the one or more objects.

11 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the reconstructed charged particle image includes one of:
a cosmic-ray muon image; a cosmic-ray electron image; or a combined cosmic-ray muon and cosmic-ray electron image.

12 . The method of claim 1 further comprising:
pre-processing the reconstructed charged particle image of the volume by smoothing and sharpening the reconstructed charged particle image of the volume;
pre-processing a reconstructed charged particle image of a background volume by smoothing and sharpening the reconstructed charged particle image of the background volume; and
subtracting the smoothed and sharpened reconstructed charged particle image of the background volume from the smoothed and sharpened reconstructed charged particle image of the volume.

13 . The method of claim 1 , comprising:
determining an orientation of the one or more objects.

14 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
finding edges of the one or more objects prior to locating the corners of the container to determine the orientation of the one or more objects.

15 . A system for analyzing a reconstructed charged particle image of a volume from charged particle detector measurements to determine a location and boundaries of one or more objects associated the volume, the system comprising:
a processor; a memory; and an image processing mechanism coupled to the processor and the memory, wherein the image processing mechanism is configured to:
perform a segmentation operation on the reconstructed charged particle image of the volume, wherein the segmentation operation identifies a subset of a set of voxels of the reconstructed charged particle image of the volume as object candidate voxels; and
determine the location, boundaries and corners of the one or more objects.

16 . The system of claim 15 , wherein the image processing mechanism is configured to:
find edges of the one or more objects prior to determining the location and boundaries of the one or more objects and locating the corners of the one or more objects.

17 . The system of claim 15 , wherein the image processing mechanism is configured to determine an orientation of the one or more objects in addition to the location, boundaries and corners.

18 . The system of claim 15 , wherein the object includes at least one container and determining the location, boundaries and corners of the one or more objects includes determining a location, boundaries and corners of the at least one container in addition to a location, boundaries and corners of contents of the container.

19 . The system of claim 15 , wherein the object includes at least one package and determining the location and boundaries of the one or more objects includes determining boundaries of contents of the at least one package.

Assignees

• Decision Sciences Int Corp

Inventors

• Patnaik Rohit

Classifications

• G06T12/30

  Image post-processing, e.g. metal artefact correction · CPC title

• G06F18/24

  Classification techniques · CPC title

• G06T7/0085

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06T11/008

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06T7/0083

  Physics · mapped topic