Particle system based adaptive sampling on spherical parameter space to improve the MDL method for construction of statistical shape models.

Minimum description length (MDL) based group-wise registration was a state-of-the-art method to determine the corresponding points of 3D shapes for the construction of statistical shape models (SSMs). However, it suffered from the problem that determined corresponding points did not uniformly spread on original shapes, since corresponding points were obtained by uniformly sampling the aligned shape on the parameterized space of unit sphere. We proposed a particle-system based method to obtain adaptive sampling positions on the unit sphere to resolve this problem. Here, a set of particles was placed on the unit sphere to construct a particle system whose energy was related to the distortions of parameterized meshes. By minimizing this energy, each particle was moved on the unit sphere. When the system became steady, particles were treated as vertices to build a spherical mesh, which was then relaxed to slightly adjust vertices to obtain optimal sampling-positions. We used 47 cases of (left and right) lungs and 50 cases of livers, (left and right) kidneys, and spleens for evaluations. Experiments showed that the proposed method was able to resolve the problem of the original MDL method, and the proposed method performed better in the generalization and specificity tests.