The objective of the CBA is to "carry out research and graduate education in computerized image analysis and scientific visualization. Both within image processing as such and with the goal of developing better methods, algorithms and systems for applications within primarily biomedicine, forestry and the environmental sciences".
We are pursuing this objective by running a large number of research projects ranging from fundamental mathematical methods development to application tailored developments and tests, the latter mainly in biomedicine and forestry. We are also developing new methods for visualization combining computer graphics and image processing in new ways.
We are twelve professors (assistant, associate and full) with PhDs who carry out our research at CBA. We are all involved with supervision of PhD and Master thesis students although to quite varying degrees. We do not at all have twelve distinct research groups (i.e., one each); there is a lot of interaction between the different researchers and for each new project usually a new combination of researchers from CBA and from other collaboration partners is formed. The university affiliation of the particular researchers seldom has any importance in the creation of these groups.
During this year, six Master thesis projects were completed with supervision from CBA. They covered a wide range of topics. Some projects were related to our own research, while some were solving problems for industry or other departments. In Section 3.2, we present these theses.
In addition to this, our 15 PhD students and the senior researchers worked on 33 different projects as described in Section 5. On the theoretical side we are founding most of our work on discrete mathematics with fundamental work on tesselations in three and more dimensions. Another fruitful theoretical foundation is fuzzy methods. A fairly large team is working on light microscopy images developing tools for modern quantitative biology. We are also working with cryo electron tomography images of biomolecules as well as with X-ray tomography images of paper and human tissue samples. A large proportion of the images we are working with are three-dimensional and here we have developed a set of tools for interactive visualization supported by so called haptics. This has resulted in a toolbox that has been made publicly available over Internet. Another toolbox which also has been made publicly available has been developed for analysing "blobs", i.e., fluorescent signals in microscopic images. Please, see Section 5 for details on our interesting research projects.