Some applications of nonlinear diffusion to processing of dynamic evolution images

Model nonlinear diffusion equation with the most simple Landau-Ginzburg free energy functional was applied to locate boundaries between meaningful regions of low-level images. The method is oriented to processing images of objects that are a result of dynamic evolution: images of different organs and tissues obtained by radiography and NMR methods, electron microscope images of morphogenesis fields, etc. In the methods developed by us, parameters of the nonlinear diffusion model are chosen on the basis of the preliminary treatment of the images. The parameters of the Landau-Ginzburg free energy functional are extracted from the structure factor of the images. Owing to such a choice of the model parameters, the image to be processed is located in the vicinity of the steady-state of the diffusion equation. The suggested method allows one to separate distinct structures having specific space characteristics from the whole image. The method was applied to processing X-ray images of the lung