1. Preliminaries

Your company has won the bid to design the new laser software for brain microsurgery. Using remote sensing technology the medical technicians can take two-dimensional projections of the (three-dimensional) brain. Since the brain is of the same tissue type, the features appear in solid colors. However, features that in three dimensions appear stacked on top of each other when scanned, appear on the scan data as overlapping solid images of different colors. It is crucial to the surgeons¹, however, that they be able to discern when an image represents stacked objects and not a single object of unusual contour lines.

The contracting remote-sensing company has seen a financial opportunity, but will spend the millions of dollars in capital improvements to produce a new product only if the proof of concept passes financial and technological muster.

Your design team has established that one of the two strategies might work:

1.

(P2) Two-Parameter process: first, apply an edge detection algorithm. Then, apply a diffusion algorithm to control the width and smoothness of the edges by blurring the edge-detected images.

2.

(P3) Three-Parameter process: apply an edge detection algorithm and then apply an advection-diffusion algorithm to smooth and/or tighten the edge-detected images.