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Recovery of Decayed Species through Image Processing

K.Priyadharsan*, S.Saranya**
Abstract: The problem of rebuilding a structure from decayed remains has been, until now, especially relevant in the ambit of forensic sciences, where it is obviously oriented toward the identification of unrecognizable corpses; but its potential interest to archaeologists and anthropologists is not negligible. This paper is about recovering the decayed species structure, through Spiral Computed Tomography data and virtual modeling techniques (in this case with VTK software), 3-D models of the possible physiognomy of ancient mummies. The species representation is based on 3D models and soft tissues are reconstructed.Isosurfaces generation is based on Marching cubes algorithm. The resulting voxel models are converted into 3d wrapped models that are coded using VTK software. The presented results iiustrate that based on the proposed methods a complete recovery of decayed structure can be built with less cost.

Keywords: VTK, CT,3-D

INTRODUCTION Reconstruction is an important key feature of image processing applications. It uses CT scannings numbers allowed a very fine discrimination between materials with amount of information not only about the mummy and its skeleton, but also about the artifacts buried with the mummy and its coffin2. Compared to traditional x-ray techniques, multiple axial images displayed http://www.srji.co.cc

different densities providing an enormous

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in a clearer way the different details of car tonnage, wrappings, amulets an internal and organs of a mummy and allowed easy measurements of exact distances between objects inside or outside the mummy. In the last years, spiral CT has considerably enhanced clinical imaging. The use of this new technique has fatherly widened the range and quality of possible investigations possi on mummies. So far, related work only considered initial representation of the fossil using CT scanning. Soft tissue reconstruction and texture mapping has to be studied in detail. In my paper, surface is constructed using Marching cubes s algorithm and some
3

mummified cranial remains allowed us to identify a male subject with an age at death of around 40 years. The skull is

dolichocranic, of medium height and with rounded occiput, narrow face, high

cheekbones, gracile even if well developed bones, in its height, jaw; the orbits are narrow, the nose is well-shaped, and of Europoid look. shaped,

2. Spiral CT Scanning

changes are made to the existing a algorithm to get better results. 3D models are wrapped and coded using VTK software This process is organized as follows. In the next section, I describe the process of anthropological and egyptological analysis of the head. Section 2 presents spiral CT of the head. Section 3 presents. Reconstruction of a 3-D model of the skull generated from D CT data processing. Section 4 presents application of textures fitting the somatic features. 3. Reconstruction of a 3D Model of the Skull 1. Preliminary Anthropological Results thropological CT slices must be stacked up and
Fig. 2 CT scanning of the head

The cranial cavity was filled with hot melted resin, later solidified, introduced with the mummy resting on its back, as the model reconstructed from the CT images clearly displays.

interpolated in order to build a volume. http://www.srji.co.cc

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Once created a volume, it is possible, by means of suitable algorithms, to generate surfaces whose points have the same function value. They are called is surfaces A popular algorithm for determining is

This stage of our work is still in a preliminary phase. Among the possible methodologies to deal with this complex problem, I focused two different promising ways: A. Protocols developed to the reconstruction rotocols of soft tissues on skull

surfaces is the so called marching cubes. The principle underlying the application of applica this algorithm to the kind of problem here described is that similar materials have the same radio-opacity and are, consequently, opacity represented in a CT scan by the same densitometry level. In CT slices, the intensity associated to each pixel in the grey-scale is proportional to tissues density: scale black corresponds to air, white to bones. It is therefore possible processing the CT scans sequence so as to obtain a 3-D grid, 3 where to each "knot" (control point) is associated the densitometry value measured by the CT scans. The result is a 3 256 3-D grey levels image.

B. Use of warping techniques. t

A. The thickness of the soft tissues is reconstructed on the bones through the use of pegs at marked points. All the pegs are joined by strips of plotline of fixed thickness and the empty spaces among them are then slowly filled with mould able material: in this way, it is possible to reconstruct nearly all the face that belonged to the living subject; on this, nose cartilage, eye globes and lips are added.

B. A different method consists in the distortion (warping) of the 3 model of a 3-D reference scanned head, until its hard tissues ce match those of the mummy. The subsequent stage is the construction of the hybrid model composed by the hard tissues of the mummy plus the soft ones of the reference

Fig. 3 a) hard tissues b) external surface

head.
5. Textures Fitting the Somatic Features t

4. Reconstruction of Soft Tissues f

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morphological information, textures provide colours and aesthetical features. They are "pasted" over the 3D models by means of mapping procedures. Moreover, being a frontal view, it does not give sufficient information for the mapping of the entire model. We get a low resolution image (fig4). Fig.6Lateralview Development of the project: soft tissue reconstruction using VTK After a first part of work, open problem is to reconstruct the lacking elements of a 3D digital model generated from CT scans applied to a mummified cranial remains. Fig 4 low resolution image The texture was mapped onto the 3D model to perfectly match the frontal view of the mummy but it loses its grain as soon as we depart from the frontal view. Much better results could be obtained with different high resolution views of a new subject. The aim is to obtain a perfect match among hard tissues so that soft tissue of reference model can be used to represent those of the mummy with a good approximation.

Moreover a tool is developed in order to apply to the model cylindrical textures obtained multiple views of a well suited individual Software implementation has been designed using VTK. Cylindrical textures obtained multiple views of a well suited individual Software implementation has been designed using VTK.

Fig 5texture, processed and colored, is mapped onto the 3-D model.

CT scans data representing our model and mummy should have the same placing, orientation, dimensions and resolution. This is generally not true especially when dealing with data coming from different machine so

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the first step is to perform a manual registration (Figure 3), that is a rigid transformation, among volumes in order to work in the same system of coordinates. Software like AIR are also available for automatic registration but sometimes,

especially when volumes are quite different, they do not produce satisfactory results. As further requirement grayscales of hard tissues must be similar, in spite of different methodologies of acquisition though Fig.6 Manchester points placed over the mummy Calculating vector displacement among couples of corresponding points we obtain a scattered field to drive a first warp phase. A feature tracking consists in determining a correspondence characteristic between points sets of the

mummys tissues has been deteriorated. It is possible to correct these differences shifting and scaling intensities using histogram information. For volume resembling, smoothing (to remove aliasing phenomena) and surface generation Vtk internal facilities are used. At this point we precede with the setup of the Manchester pegs onto the surface of the hard tissues of the mummy while for the reference model it can be predetermined. The aim of this phase is to fix some constraints for the resulting physiognomy and to provide a first guess for the following step that is the features tracking.

pertaining to

volumes in order to obtain a scatter motion field with more details. It is the most important step.

Initially this set of points is chosen as a subset of points that are vertices of hard tissues surface of the mummy; some of these points, corresponding position in the reference volume. If the result is good, the resulting motion field is defined among subsets of bone surfaces, with particular characteristics, are identified as features. If, consecutively a test, a feature is retained reliable, we search the from the reference http://www.srji.co.cc

Pegs are mapped onto a spherical surface of parametric ratio, so that the user can place quickly the whole set and the adjust single pegs.

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Once generated a scattered motion field, it must be diffused within the whole reference volume. Diffused motion field can be used to warp every structure pertaining to arp reference model coherently with mummy model therefore we reconstruct mummy soft tissues warping those of reference model Fig .9 Model skin (blue) and mummy skull (white)

Fig 10 Face generated

We consider the relation between hard tissues surface of the reference model and Fig 7 wrap driven by manchester points hard tissue surface of the mummy as a continuous deformation in the time. If is the intensity of a point

of coordinates (x,y,z) at time t in the mummy and volume

is where e

the

motion m ,

field,

are components in x, y e z

directions of velocity vector, we suppose that the intensity function is the same at the time Fig.8 Model skull (blue) after this stage overlapped with mummy skull (white) point of the http://www.srji.co.cc in the

Vol.1 No.3 2012 reference where e (1) and , .

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Known as motion field constraint equation, where Ex, Ey, Ez ed Et are partial derivatives. We say that x is a reliable feature if

If the intensity function change smoothly sm with x, y, z e t, we can manipulate the equation (1) with Taylors series to obtain (2)

(6)

Where: I( where e contains terms in x, y, z e t higher than first order. Eliminating , rationing by t, , we , t) is the matrix of intensity function =(x,y,z) in the region W(x)

E in the point at the time t;

is the gradient operator; min () represents the smaller eigenvalue ) of matrix ; are predetermined thresholds. We consider a window (q) centered in q of that is the totally derivative of time. in the dimensions.

and calculating limit for obtain (3)

We represent (6) in discrete fashion (7)

(4) Using abbreviated notation: The solution of (4) respect to V is given by In this moment this stage is still in developing so we have no picture, anyway the idea is simple: for each of the Manchester points we find its corresponding w http://www.srji.co.cc

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on the skin surface, in this way we can measure the actual soft tissue thickness. By consulting the thickness table we find the corresponding desired thickness measure. Saying that the actual thickness must become the desired thickness we generate another scattered field.

amount of data, was to process and visualize in real time and in 3D the data volume. Through this paper I hope that this method will be a useful one to the society.

REFERENCES 1. S.B. Kang, R. Szeliski, and P. Anandan, The Geometry-Image Trade off for

Texture Application

Representation

Rendering, Proc. ICIP, Vancouver, Canada, September 2000.

2. P. Eisert, E. Steinbach, and B. Girod, Multi-hypothesis, Volumetric

Reconstruction of 3-D Objects. Proc. ICASSP, pp. 3509-3512, Phoenix, Mar. 1999.

3. W. E. Lorensen, and H. E. Cline, Marching Cubes: A high resolution CONCLUSION: In this paper, for obtaining the better 3D 3D surface reconstruction algorithm, Proc. SIGGRAPH, vol. 21, no. 4, pp 163-169, 1987. virtual

performances

through

visualization of the reconstruction i have used the powerful workstation Onyx2 equipped with an architecture of type multiprocessor, with 4 processors R10K, 1 Gbyte of RAM, computing power of 1.5 Gflop, 1 graphic pipeline, that it can process 11 millions of polygons per second. In fact the main problem, processing a large http://www.srji.co.cc 4. P. Debevec, C. Taylor, and J. Malik, Modeling and rendering

architecture from photographs: A hybrid geometry image based

approach, Proc. SIGGRAPH, pp. 11-20, 1996.

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CORRESPONDENCE
*DR-DO Project Assistant, Centre for R&D, PRIST University, Thanjavur, India. Email: kvpriyadharshan@gmail.com. **Lecturer, Department of Comp Science & Engg, Bharadhidasan University, Trichy, India. Email: saranyapristina@gmail.com

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