In order to display the surfaces of internal structures within a solid body from non-intrusively acquired data sets, it is useful to segment the data sets into the internal structures of interest before searching for the surfaces of such structures. To accomplish this, a data segmentation system uses a plurality of sample data points to construct a statistical probability distribution for a plurality of internal structures. Using these probability distributions, each data point is labeled with t...

A method and apparatus for differentiating and extracting handwritten annotations and machine printed text in an image. The method provides for the use of morphological operations, preferably at reduced scale, to eliminate for example, the handwritten annotations from an image. A separation mask is produced that, for example, converts all the image pixels corresponding to machine printed text, and none of the image pixels corresponding to handwritten or handprinted annotations. The separation ma...

A hydrophone transducer is prepared by depositing a piezoelectric material upon a conductive substrate or support structure, and then etching the material into selected regions or segments. The center segment, which provides most of the fundamental signal, is polarized in a first direction by the introduction of a polarizing voltage. The end segments are polarized in the opposite direction by the imposition of a polarizing voltage in the opposite direction. The conductive substrate then serves a...

Images having a moving pattern against a fixed or quasi-fixed background are segmented by determining a silhouette of the moving pattern, and forming a segmentation image filling the silhouette. On a pixel-by-pixel basis, differences are determined between the current image and previous images of a sequence, and compared with a threshold to form a binary image of background and useful zone. The boundaries of the useful zone are regularized, and irregularities in the useful zone and in the backgr...

An image processing method for preparing a document for printing or other further processing. Document images often contain information in several intensity levels. Detecting these levels will help separate logically separate regions in the image. A multithresholding process separates different significant intensity levels in a document image by recursively finding locally optimum threshold locations, and then selecting only the significant thresholds by studying the intensity transitions in the...

Segmentation of characters in a character set (10), made by placing a dark mark against a light background (12), is accomplished by establishing a vertical pixel projection for each pixel column in the image. The vertical pixel projections are filtered with a decay parameter so those pixel columns which contain only background have the highest projection. Thereafter, a set of "cut-points" (points of image segmentation) is obtained so that each cut-point coincides with a pixel column whose vertic...

In a video based image recognition system, an adaptive threshold level for each pixel is set based upon a running horizontal and/or running vertical average of the pixel intensities combined with suppression of the running average threshold computation to hold the threshold value constant upon the detection of pixels with an intensity above the threshold, and continuing until the detection of a pixel having an intensity lower than the held constant value. After the edge of an image has been dete...

A method and an apparatus which scans and recognizes a page having columns of text or pictorial images. The scanned page is partitioned into blocks of scanlines and the column gap between the columns are identified by a projection profile process. With this technique the page can be severely tilted while under scan and still be properly recognized.

In conjunction with an image segmentation arrangement, in which the image is processed with an image type detection arrangement, the output of which controls an image processing of the image, there is provided a morphological filtering operation, which initially provides a noise removal filter operating on the image detection signal, to remove noise within an area of the image detection signal, and subsequently provides hole filling filter, which bridges small gaps in the image type detection re...

Segmentation of FLASH Memory arrays allows the global and local bit lines to be isolated, greatly reducing global bit line capacitance, reducing bit line stress, and eliminating boot block disturb effects. Reduction in bit line capacitance also results in fast access time greatly improving the ability to implement larger arrays without paying severe access time penalties.