Automated motion reduction in dynamic infrared imaging is on demand in clinical applications, since movement disarranges time−temperature series of each pixel, thus originating thermal artifacts that might bias the clinical decision. All previously proposed registration methods are feature based algorithms requiring manual intervention. The aim of this work is to optimize the registration strategy specifically for Breast Dynamic Infrared Imaging and to make it user−independent. We implemented and evaluated 3 different 3D time−series registration methods: 1. Linear affine, 2. Non−linear Bspline, 3. Demons applied to 12 datasets of healthy breast thermal images. The results are evaluated through normalized mutual information with average values of 0.70 ±0.03, 0.74 ±0.03 and 0.81 ±0.09 (out of 1) for Affine, Bspline and Demons registration, respectively, as well as breast boundary overlap and Jacobian determinant of the deformation field. The statistical analysis of the results showed that symmetric diffeomorphic Demons’ registration method outperforms also with the best breast alignment and non−negative Jacobian values which guarantee image similarity and anatomical consistency of the transformation, due to homologous forces enforcing the pixel geometric disparities to be shortened on all the frames. We propose Demons’ registration as an effective technique for time−series dynamic infrared registration, to stabilize the local temperature oscillation.
This paper presents and assesses an inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP) solution procedure which was developed to determine the local convective heat transfer coefficient along the circumferential coordinate at the inner wall of a coiled pipe by applying the filtering technique approach to infrared temperature maps acquired on the outer tube’s wall. The data−processing procedure filters out the unwanted noise from the raw temperature data to enable the direct calculation of its Laplacian which is embedded in the formulation of the inverse heat conduction problem. The presented technique is experimentally verified using data that were acquired in the laminar flow regime that is frequently found in coiled−tube heat−exchanger applications. The estimated convective heat transfer coefficient distributions are substantially consistent with the available numerical results in the scientific literature.