No abstract

The paper presmts a tool which can assist surgeons in judging on the success of nose surgeries. Furthermore, the tool is useful to investigate the long term development of noses which underwent a plastic surgery (rhinoplasty). The described 1,001 makes use of simple methods for the quantitative characterization of profile iniages of hunmn noses. The main processing steps include image acquisition, binarization, profile extraction, profile normalization, feature extraction, and feature analysis. These processing steps are described in detail. We introduce features that are suitable to characterize nose profiles extracted from lateral photographs of patients. Moreover, the tool can assist surgeons in a quantitative manner in judging the success of nose surgeries. It reliably detects regions where material has been added or removed, and quantitatively describes the changes. Traditionally, these changes are detected through visual inspection and are only qualitatively characterized. Thus the proposed nietrhod is useful in judging the result of a surgery in a more objective and reproducible manner. Experimental results and experiences are reported in detail in the paper.-21-