SEMI-BLIND JOINT SUPER-RESOLUTION/SEGMENTATION OF 3D TRABECULAR BONE IMAGES BY A TV BOX APPROACH

The investigation of bone fragility diseases, as osteoporosis, is based on the analysis of the trabecular bone micro architecture. The aim of this paper is to improve the in-vivo trabecular bone segmentation and quantification by increasing the resolution of bone micro-architecture images. We propose a semi-blind joint super-resolution/segmentation approach based on a Total Variation regularization with a convex constraint. A comparison with the bicubic interpolation method and the non-blind version of the proposed method is shown. The validation is performed on blurred, noisy and down-sampled 3D synchrotron micro-CT bone images. Good estimates of the blur and of the high resolution image are obtained with the semi-blind approach. Preliminary results are obtained with the semi-blind approach on real HR-pQCT images.