Glasgow Wilson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and principal investigator of the center. There are no existing vision systems capable of recognizing a human crawling through grass, a dog running across a field, or the subtle substructures of the human brain, for instance. There are many difficulties that have prevented this from becoming reality, including shapes and intensity patterns that vary greatly because of viewpoint, lighting and other factors, and the complexities of real-world imagery consisting of multiple objects that are at least partially hidden and often deformed. However, revolutionary developments in remote sensing devices over the past two decades, combined with an emerging concept in mathematics and computational vision called pattern theory, give the center a strong basis to address the fundamental scientific difficulties of recognizing and understanding complex scenes. We're extremely pleased that the U.S. Army has selected Washington University as the site to fulfill this national mission.
Pattern theory is the foundation for the work to be conducted at the center.
The problems the center will address, though a major challenge to the military, also are key to planetary and medical imaging processes. However, one problem with CT is that no two human brains are exactly alike and computer representations can miss subtle features of varying anatomical representations. Miller and his colleagues have concentrated on biomedical computer-imaging projects in recent years, with one major emphasis being the development of a computerized textbook map of biological variation. Such a map would serve as a basis for neurosurgeons and neurologists to compare with the biological coordinates of a real brain. Miller said the representation component of the imaging center involves making a template and then transforming it.