Computer Science Department News

There will be a Colloquium on October 3 at 10:00 AM by Pahal K. Dalal

MONDAY OCTOBER 3

E & C S BUILDING AUDITORIUM (1ST FLOOR)

TIME: 10:00 (DONUTS) 10:10 (TALK)

3D Shape Correspondence: Beyond Groupwise Methods and Smooth, Closed Surfaces

Pahal K. Dalal

For identifying the disease-affected regions using medical images, it is important to bring all individual instances into the common space for comparison (between normal and abnormal groups). To achieve this, one way is to identify the shape-based correspondences between multiple instances of the same organ. The objective of shape correspondence then is to identify corresponding landmarks across a population of instances of the same shape. However, the non-rigid variation observed in naturally occurring 3D structures leads to a highly non-linear and complex problem. While various efforts have been made to address the problem of shape correspondence in previous research works, most existing methods are limited in their application to the smooth, closed-surface type of shape. This work investigates the problem of shape correspondence for the case of 3D closed-surface, open-surface and highly convoluted surfaces. A novel 3D landmark sliding framework which can be used to bring both closed-surface and open-surface shapes into correspondence is introduced along with the concept of topological consistency of landmarks. Further, a method of organizing a population of shape instances into a novel Low-Height tree structure to minimize the shape correspondence errors is developed.

Pahal Dalal is currently a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Corporate LLC. He received the M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Carolina in 2007 and 2011, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis focused on Statistical Shape Analysis and 3D Shape Correspondence for medical imaging applications. In 2007 he was recognized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina as the Outstanding Teaching Assistant, and as the Outstanding Research Assistant in 2010.