Extraction of tubular structures over an orientation domain

Figure 1. Centerlines and radii extraction of vessels in a retinal image, vessels in a cortical image and roads in a satellite image. This paper presents a new method to extract tubular structures from bi-dimensional images. The core of the proposed algorithm is the computation of geodesic curves over a four-dimensional space that includes local orienta-tion and scale. These shortest paths follow closely the cen-terline of tubular structures, provide an estimation of the radius and can deal robustly with crossings over the image plane. Numerical experiments on a database of synthetic and natural images show the superiority of the proposed approach with respect to several method based on shortest paths extractions. 1