Reconstructing Curvilinear Networks Using Path Classifiers and Integer Programming

• Published in: IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence Vol. 38; no. 12; pp. 2515 - 2530
• Main Authors: Turetken, Engin, Benmansour, Fethallah, Andres, Bjoern, Głowacki, Przemysław, Pfister, Hanspeter, Fua, Pascal
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.12.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: automated reconstruction; Biomedical imaging; Classification; Classifiers; Curvilinear networks; Curvilinear structures; Electronic mail; Graphical representations; Image reconstruction; Integer programming; Integers; Linear programming; minimum arborescence; Network topologies; path classification; Path planning; Photomicrographs; Roads; tubular structures
• ISSN: 0162-8828; 1939-3539; 2160-9292; 1939-3539
• DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2016.2519025

We propose a novel approach to automated delineation of curvilinear structures that form complex and potentially loopy networks. By representing the image data as a graph of potential paths, we first show how to weight these paths using discriminatively-trained classifiers that are both robust and generic enough to be applied to very different imaging modalities. We then present an Integer Programming approach to finding the optimal subset of paths, subject to structural and topological constraints that eliminate implausible solutions. Unlike earlier approaches that assume a tree topology for the networks, ours explicitly models the fact that the networks may contain loops, and can reconstruct both cyclic and acyclic ones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a variety of challenging datasets including aerial images of road networks and micrographs of neural arbors, and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.