A Restricted, Adaptive Threshold Segmentation Approach for Processing High-Speed Image Sequences of the Glottis

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a restricted, adaptive threshold approach for the segmentation of images of the glottis acquired from high speed video-endoscopy (HSV). The approach involves first, identifying a region of interest (ROI) that encloses the vocal-fold motion extent for each image frame as estimated by the different image sequences. This procedure is then followed by threshold segmentation restricted within the identified ROI for each image frame of the original image sequences, or referred to as sub-image sequences. The threshold value is adapted for each sub-image frame and determined by respective minimum gray-scale value that typically corresponds to a spatial location within the glottis. The proposed approach is practical and highly efficient for segmenting a vast amount of image frames since simple threshold method is adapted. Results obtained from the segmentation of representative clinical image sequences are presented to verify the proposed method.