A Robust Level-Set Algorithm for Centerline Extraction

We present a robust method for extracting 3D centerlines from volumetric datasets. We start from a 2D skeletonization method to locate voxels centered with respect to three orthogonal slicing directions. Next, we introduce a new detection criterion to extract the centerline voxels from the above skeletons, followed by a thinning, reconnection, and a ranking step. Overall, the proposed method produces centerlines that are object-centered, connected, one voxel thick, robust with respect to object noisiness, handles arbitrary object topologies, comes with a simple pruning threshold, and is fast to compute. We compare our results with two other methods on a variety of real-world datasets.

@InProceedings { TV03a,
  author       = "Telea, A.C. and Vilanova, Anna",
  title        = "A Robust Level-Set Algorithm for Centerline Extraction",
  booktitle    = "{VisSym} '03 Joint Eurographics - {IEEE} {TCVG} Symposium on Visualization, Conference Proceedings",
  pages        = "185 -- 194",
  year         = "2003",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2003/TV03a"
}