A key issue in brain imaging concerns how to detect the functionally activated regions from PET and fMRI images. In earlier work, it has been shown that the scale-space primal sketch provides a useful tool for such analysis [1]. The method includes presmoothing with different filter widths and automatic estimation of the spatial extent of the activated regions (blobs).

The purpose is to present two modifications of the scale-space primal sketch, as well as a quantitative evaluation which shows that these modifications improve the performance, measured as the separation between blob descriptors extracted from PET images and from noise images. This separation is essential for future work of associating a statistical p-value with the scale-space blob descriptors.