Abstract
This paper proposes an interactive method for tubular structure segmentation. The method is based on the minimal paths obtained from the geodesic distance solved by the heat equation. This distance can be based both on isotropic or anisotropic metric by solving the corresponding heat equation. Thanks to the additional dimension added for the local radius around the centerline, our method can not only detect the centerline of the structure, but also extracts the boundaries of the structures. Our algorithm is tested on both synthetic and real images. The promising results demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the algorithm.
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Notes
- 1.
This image is obtained from the website of GettyImages, it is a DigitalGlobe Worldview-1 satellite image, showing abandoned cars on the road that leads to the top of the Sinjar Mountain Range.
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Dr. Jean-Marie Mirebeau for his fruitful discussions and suggestions on the numerical solutions of isotropic and anisotropic heat equations in 3D space.
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Yang, F., Cohen, L.D. (2017). Tubular Structure Segmentation Based on Heat Diffusion. In: Lauze, F., Dong, Y., Dahl, A. (eds) Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision. SSVM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10302. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58771-4_5
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