Contour model guided image warping for image interpolation

An interpolation method, morphological field morphing, using contours of organs as the control parameters is proposed to recover the intensity information in the physical gaps of serial cross-sectional images. Contour information derived from a contour-model-based segmentation process is processed and used as the control parameters to warp the corresponding regions in both input images into comparable shapes. In this way, the reliability of establishing the correspondence among different segments of the same organs is improved and the intensity information for the interpolated intermediate slices can be derived more faithfully. In comparison with the existing intensity interpolation algorithms that only search for corresponding points based on intensity information, this method provides more meaningful correspondence relationships by warping corresponding regions in images into similar shapes before resampling to account for significant shape differences