From seanho@cs.unc.edu Mon Oct 29 16:07:30 2001
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 15:35:42 -0500
From: Sean Ho <seanho@cs.unc.edu>
To: J. S. Marron <marron@email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: reference

Hi Steve,

Hope everything is fine in Ithaca!  The first reference I learned
Fourier methods from is:
  F.P. Kuhl and Ch. R. Giardina.  Elliptic fourier features of a closed
contour.  "Computer Graphics and Image Processing", 18(3):236-258, March
1982.
It is a fairly detailed description of the nitty-gritty process of
extracting Fourier coefficients from binary images.  It does not discuss
to any significant degree use of Fourier coefficients in image
segmentation or shape analysis.

Another frequently cited historical reference is:
  E. Persoon and K.S. Fu.  Shape discrimination using fourier
descriptors.  "IEEE Trans. Systems, Man and Cybernetics SMC",
7(3):170-179, March 1977.
As you can tell, the idea of Fourier shape descriptors has been around
for a while.  I haven't read this paper, but I see it cited often.  I
would assume the application is more like robotic vision than medical
image analysis.

A little bit closer to home is:
  G. Szekely, A. Kelemen, C. Brechbuhler and G. Gerig.  Segmentation of
2-D and 3-D objects from MRI volume data using constrained elastic
deformations of flexible Fourier contour and surface models.  "Medical
Image Analysis", 1(1):19-34, 1996.
This describes our recipe, and the journal paper covers the definition
of our Fourier shape descriptors, as well as their use in image
segmentation (though not shape analysis or discrimination).  It also
talks a bit about the 3D version, using spherical harmonic shape
descriptors.

Hope this helps,

"J. S. Marron" wrote:
> 
> Hi Sean,
>     Hope things are going well for you.
>     I just got an email from a friend who seems to have redeveloped a lot
> of the Fourier boundary methods that were part of the data that you kindly
> supplied me with.
>     I think he could benefit a lot from access to the literature on
> that.  Is there some simple direct reference that I could give about that
> methodology?
> 
> Best,
> Steve

-- 
  Sean Ho                                 seanho @ cs.unc.edu
  Dept. of Computer Science, CB #3175     http://www.cs.unc.edu/~seanho/
  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175