A Robust Line Filter for Automatic X-Ray/CT Image Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of the line-like regions plays a very important role in the automatic recognition system, such as automatic cracks recognition in X-ray images, automatic vessels segmentation in CT images. In order to automatically segment line-like regions in the X-ray/CT images, this paper presents a robust line filter based on the local gray level variation and multiscale analysis. The proposed line filter makes usage of the local gray level and its local variation to enhance line-like regions in the X-ray/CT image, which can well overcome the problems of the image noises and non-uniform intensity of the images. For detecting various sizes of line-like regions, an image pyramid is constructed based on different neighboring distances, which enables the proposed filter to analyze different sizes of regions independently. Experimental results showed that the proposed line filter can well segment various sizes of line-like regions in the X-ray/CT images, which are with image noises and non-uniform intensity problems.