[Insight-users] Object Labeling - Attribute representing neighborhood

[Christian Werner]

Hello!

I am currently working with Gaetens Object Labeling/Measuring. It really 
does a good job and I am glad that it seemlessly integrates into my 
software. Now that I have analyzed how I could improve my object 
evalution, I was looking for a way to qualify the neighborhood of an 
object. It seems that this is a very characteristic trait of every ROI. 
Looking at all pixels/voxels contained in the bounding box and e.g. take 
their average would already give a rough estimate. Objects that e.g. 
differ in the variance in the values of their neighboring elements could 
be easily distinguished, even if all other attributes would suggest that 
they are of the same type (roundness, size, ...). At least this is what 
I could need for my analyzing purposes.

Despite of the "simple" solution of the boundnig box I thought of 
several ways to realize this. One could for example dilate all objects 
to a certain degree, then subtract the original object to obtain a thick 
layer surrounding the object. This layer would be an object itself and 
you could just go ahead and qualify this layer as any other object. But 
this would mean that you have to somehow make a correspodance between 
all layers and all objects that they belong to. Assuming that the 
labeling itself is already consistent (layers will get same IDs as the 
object), everything would just be fine, but I doubt that you can trust 
that this is always the case.

Maybe there is already another way to qualify the neighborhood? I didn't 
get to find such funcionality when looking through the paper.

Best regards,
Christian