Section: New Results

Curvilinear structure analysis using path operators

Participant: Hugues Talbot (in collaboration with O. Merveille, N. Passat, CRESTIC, and L. Najman, ESIEE Paris)

In this work, we propose mathematical morphology based operators that use paths as families of structuring elements [12]. Structuring elements are like the windows of linear operators, they define the extent of the related operators (convolutions in the linear case, openings and closings in the morphology case). When dealing with thin objects (e.g. fibres, blood vessels, textures, etc), a compact, isotropic window is usually inappropriate because no such window can fit in these objects. This is more critical for morphology, which is concerned with preserving shapes, than with linear operators. Thin windows must therefore be devised, but there are a large number of potentially interesting thin windows at each point in an image. In this article, we leverage the definition of noise-resistant, path operators to define a non-linear notion of vesselness, that can be used for thin object detection, filtering and segmentation in 2D and 3D.