Abstract. The growing usage of statistical shape analysis in medical imaging calls for effective methods for highly accurate shape correspondence. This paper presents a novel landmark-based method to correspond a set of 2D shape instances in a nonrigid fashion. Different from prior methods, the proposed method combines three important factors in measuring the shape-correspondence error: landmark-correspondence error, shape-representation error, and shape-representation compactness. In this method, these three important factors are explicitly handled by the landmark sliding, insertion, and deletion operations, respectively. The proposed method is tested on several sets of structural shape instances extracted from medical images. We also conduct an empirical study to compare the developed method to the popular Minimum Description Length method.
Abstract. Shape correspondence is the foundation for accurate statistical shape analysis; this is usually accomplished by identifying a set of sparsely sampled and well-corresponded landmark points across a population of shape instances. However, most available shape correspondence methods can only effectively deal with complete-shape correspondence, where a one-to-one mapping is assumed between any two shape instances. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to correspond 2D open-curve partial-shape instances where one shape instance may only be mapped to part of the other, i.e., the endpoints of these open-curve shape instances are not presumably corresponded. In this algorithm, some initially identified landmarks, including the ones at or near the endpoints of the shape instances, are refined by allowing them to slide freely along the shape contour to minimize the shape-correspondence error. To avoid being trapped into local optima, we develop a simple method to construct a better initialization of the landmarks and introduce some additional constraints to the landmark sliding. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on 32 femur shape instances in comparison to some current methods.
With the increasing ability for students to enrich educational experiences with online content and the move toward virtual schools, Richland County School District One has taken the initiative to develop a complete online academy. The goal of the Richland One Virtual Education Resources (Rover) Academy is to allow students in face-to-face classrooms to have access to courses not offered in their home schools as well as allow homebound students to continue to receive an accredited education. This has and continues to involve an extensive look at the best practices for the construction of such a virtual facility in terms of software engineering, hardware solutions, ease of use, and educational experience. Through the course of this paper, we present the findings of this best practices study as well as recommended steps and implementations to develop similar online academies in other school districts. Specific emphasis is placed on system security, course development, lesson conferencing, learning management systems, and logistical management culminating in a reusable evaluation for the effectiveness of the entire system that can be used to improve extant systems and guide the construction of new online academies.
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