CORRELATION SEARCH METHOD WITH THIRD-ORDER STATISTICS FOR COMPUTING VELOCITIES FROM MEDICAL IMAGES

The correlation search method yields velocity information by tracking scatter patterns between medical image frames. The displacement vector between a target region and the best correlated search region indicates the magnitude and direction of the inter-frame motion of that particular region. However, if the noise sources in the target region and the search region are correlated Gaussian, then the cross-correlation technique fails to work well because it estimates the cross-correlation of both signals and noises. In this paper we develop a new correlation search method which seeks the best correlated third-order statistics between a target and the search region to suppress the effect of correlated Gaussian noise sources. Our new method yields better estimations of velocity than the conventional cross-correlation method.