A method locates one or more physical pointers around the body, such as a steel ball or other distinguishable item, and captures two distinct x-ray images (410) of the body, such that the physical pointers are captured in the x-ray images. The locations of the physical pointers in the images (410) are used to estimate the horizontal and vertical distortions. The images (410) are adjusted vertically and horizontally to correct for any estimated distortions. A disparity map may then be calculated manually or using the classic epipolar stereo matching technique. The disparity map provides the location of one or more distinctive objects inside the body.

The invention is directed to a method and an apparatus for scanning the terrain surface and other objects transversely to the flight direction or direction of motion of the scanner with a detector row arranged perpendicularly to the direction of scanning and containing several individual detectors of equal size, wherein the terrain- or object strip to be scanned is divided into various distance ranges, within which the fundamental detector signals within the detector row as well as of consecutive exposure periods are collated respectively in such a way by averaging, that the collated individual signals form or cover respectively one object pixel of approximately constant magnitude independent of the scanning distance, and wherein these object pixels stand always at right angles with respect to the scanning beam and where each scanning sweep produces a terrain- or object strip with approximately equal object pixel size as well as constant object pixel number along the width and length of the scanned strip. This method and apparatus eliminates the known deficiency of opto-mechanical scanners, whose scanned strips have changeable strip widths as a function of the scanning distance.

An electro-optical system that implements the self-tiling process of fining proper Iterated Function Systems for modeling natural objects. The system can operate in two different modes, a real-time interactive mode and an automated mode. The purpose of the system is to speed up the process of finding a proper IFS for a given object to be modeled. The system makes use of optical processing, including optical means for rotating, magnifying/demagnifying and translating an input image. Optical beamsplitters are used to combine transformed images to produce a tiled output image. In one embodiment, an automated controller evaluates the goodness of the match between the tiled image and the input image and generates control signals which cause adjustment of the settings of the optical means. The process is repeated automatically until the match is sufficiently good. The invention can also be operated in a manual, man-in-the-loop mode.

An image computing and processing apparatus for computing correspondence between images from a plurality of images and for obtaining disparity corresponding to the depth of an image. Also, an apparatus for synthesizing from the disparity and image data an image as viewed from a designated viewing direction. The apparatus has a base image frame memory for storing a base image, a reference image frame memory for storing a reference image, a block correlation computing circuit for computing block correlations and confidence measure for estimation by using a plurality of block sizes, a representative pixel correlation computing circuit, and an estimation integrating computing circuit for evaluating the reliability of the result of estimation by block matching on the basis of a luminance gradient, image noise, a minimum value of an evaluation yardstick for differences between blocks, and block size, and for integrating the results of estimation obtained with the plurality of block sizes.

A method and apparatus for processing a geometric relationship between the image motion of pairs of points over multiple image frames representing a three-dimensional scene. This relationship is based on the parallax motion of points with respect to an arbitrary planar surface, and does not involve epipolar geometry. A constraint is derived over two frames for any pair of points, relating their projective structure (with respect to the plane) based only on their image coordinates and their parallax displacements. Similarly, a 3D-rigidity constraint between pairs of points over multiple frames is derived. Also disclosed are applications of these parallax-based constraints to solving three important problems in 3D scene analysis: (i) the recovery of 3D scene structure, (ii) the detection of moving objects in the presence of camera induced motion, and (iii) the synthesis of new camera views based on a given set of views. Moreover, this approach can handle difficult situations for 3D scene analysis, e.g., where there is only a small set of parallax vectors, and in the presence of independently moving objects.