Multiresolution spot detection by means of entropy thresholding

J Opt Soc Am A Opt Image Sci Vis. 2000 Jul;17(7):1160-71. doi: 10.1364/josaa.17.001160.

Abstract

Many imaging applications deal with the detection of small targets or spots embedded within an inhomogeneous background. We present a method that accomplishes a multiresolution detection on the wavelet-transformed image. The targets are separated from the background by the exploitation of Renyi's information, which is evaluated at the different decomposition levels of the wavelet transform. The scale-dependent candidate detections are successively combined by means of majority voting for final detection. Connections with results provided in different fields such as multifractal analysis, generalized information measures in scale-space, and cross-entropy analysis in fine-to-coarse transformations are discussed. Detection performance is investigated through an example from medical image analysis.

MeSH terms

  • Diagnostic Imaging*
  • Differential Threshold
  • Entropy*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Mammography
  • Models, Theoretical