ABSTRACT
This paper presents image and video analysis based schemes to automate the process of adductors angle measurement which is carried out on infants as a part of Hammersmith Infant Neurological Examination (HINE). Image segmentation, thinning and feature point based object tracking are used for automating the analysis. Segmentation outputs are processed with a novel region merging algorithm. It is found that the refined segmentation outputs can successfully be used to extract features in the context of the application under consideration. Next, a heuristic based filtering algorithm is applied on the thinned structures for locating necessary points to measure adductors angle. A semi-automatic scheme based on the object tracking of a video has been proposed to minimize errors of the image based analysis. It is observed that the video-based analysis outperforms the image-based method. A fully automatic method has also been proposed and compared with the semi-automatic algorithm. The proposed methods have been tested with several videos recorded from hospitals and the results have been found to be satisfactory in the present context.
