A Region Growing Method Using Hyper Surface Curvature and Its Application to Extraction of Blood Vessel Region from Chest X-ray CT Images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new region growing method using curvatures of hyper surface as conditions of expansion. The hyper surface curvatures are calculated at every point in a three dimensional(3D) gray image using coefficients of polynomial expressions estimated by the local hyper surface fitting. The basic nature of the curvature obtained by the proposed method is compared with that by the previous method through experiments using artificial images. Furthermore, the curvatures are used as conditions for the region growing method to extract vessel regions from practical 3D CT images. As a result, it was shown that the curvatures obtained by the proposed method were useful as a 3D shape feature for segmentation.