Patent ID: 7627154

Claim:
A method for automatically classifying a digital radiographic image, comprising the following steps, carried out by a programmable digital computer, of: acquiring the digital radiographic image comprised of a matrix of rows and columns of pixels; segmenting the image into foreground, background, and anatomy regions; classifying a physical size of the anatomy region using image capture information; classifying a shape pattern of the anatomy region; and categorizing the image based on the physical size classification and the shape pattern classification; wherein the step of classifying a physical size comprises: collecting image capture parameters computing features from the foreground, background and anatomy regions; training a classifier with the features and image capture parameters; and performing the classification using the trained classifier; and wherein said features and said image capture parameters include one or more of the following: a ratio of the anatomy's area to the image area, a ratio of the background area to the image area, and a ratio of the foreground area to the image area.