Projection Onto the Manifold of Elongated Structures for Accurate Extraction

Detection of elongated structures in 2D images and 3D image stacks is a critical prerequisite in many applications and Machine Learning-based approaches have recently been shown to deliver superior performance. However, these methods essentially classify individual locations and do not explicitly model the strong relationship that exists between neighboring ones. As a result, isolated erroneous responses, discontinuities, and topological errors are present in the resulting score maps. We solve this problem by projecting patches of the score map to their nearest neighbors in a set of ground truth training patches. Our algorithm induces global spatial consistency on the classifier score map and returns results that are provably geometrically consistent. We apply our algorithm to challenging datasets in four different domains and show that it compares favorably to state-of-the-art methods.