Image Analysis in Sweden

Swedish research in image analysis has been very prominent ever since the inception of the field in the 1970s.  Early contributions to adaptive filtering and image processing hardware design in Linköping led to several spin-off companies in the 1980s, and some of these companies are still actively selling image processing components for medical imaging. Research also led to an internationally leading company in radiology image handling, PACS. Medical applications have been a particular focus in Sweden with successful companies in also in radiotherapy planning and image analysis of microscopic blood samples.

Other results more visible to the general public are 3D image generation from stereo photos handwritten character recognition, and face recognition. Successful start-ups in these fields have been sold to big international companies.

Image analysis is today essential to handle, visualize and quantitatively analyze the vast amounts of images generated by modern medicine and biological research. Swedish researchers are at the international forefront in developing much needed tools, in particular at the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV) in Linköping, the Centre for Image Analysis (CBA) and SciLifeLab in Uppsala, the Computer Vision and Active Perception Lab (CVAP) at KTH, the Mathematical Imaging Group (MIG) in Lund, the Spatial Statistics and Image Analysis group at Mathematical Sciences at Chalmers and Gothenburg University, and the Imaging and Image Analysis group at Signals and Systems at Chalmers.

The figure below illustrates the wide variety of disciplines that uses image analysis.