Isotropic Multiresolution Analysis for 3D-Textures and Applications in Cardiovascular Imaging

The main goal of this paper is to introduce formally the concept of texture segmentation/identification in three dimensional images. A major problem in texture texture segmentation/identification is the lack of robustness to both translations and rotations. This problem is more difficult to overcome in 3D-images, such as those generated by modalities such as x-ray CT and MRI. To facilitate 3D-texture segmentation/identification which is robust to 3D rigid motions we formally introduce the concept of steerable feature maps and of appropriate metrics in the feature space. We also introduce a new multiscale representation giving rise to a steerable feature map used in our exploratory project in cardiovascular imaging and we propose a 3D-texture segmentation algorithm utilizing this steerable feature map.