System for detecting objects in streaming 3d images formed from data acquired with a medium penetrating sensor

A computing system for identifying occurrences of a physical characteristic of a medium, the computing system comprising:

• a storage medium for storing images of a sequence of image frames of the medium, each image frame corresponding to an along-medium location, each image frame having voxels associated with various depths and cross-medium locations at that along-medium location, each voxel having an intensity;
• a component that generates a depth-compensated intensity for each voxel that is a normalization of the intensities across depths to account for variations resulting from differences in depth;
• a component that analyzes the depth-compensated intensities to identify object voxels that are part of a physical characteristic of the medium;
• and
• a component that determines which of the object voxels are part of the same occurrence of the physical characteristic.

A computer-readable storage medium storing computer-executable instructions for detecting an object in a medium, the computer-executable instruction comprising instructions that:

• access a sequence of image frames of the medium, each image frame corresponding to an along-medium location, each image frame having voxels representing various depths and cross-medium locations at that along-medium location, each voxel having an intensity;
• generate a depth-compensated intensity for each voxel that is a normalization of the intensities across depths to account for variations resulting from differences in depth;
• analyze the depth-compensated intensities to identify object voxels that are part of an object within the medium;
• and
• determine which of the identified voxels are part of the same object based on proximity of the voxels within the medium.