The relationship between curvilinear structure enhancement and ridge detection methods

Abstract

Curvilinear structure detection and quantification is a large research area with many imaging applications in fields such as biology, medicine, and engineering. Curvilinear enhancement is often used as a pre-processing stage for ridge detection, but there has been little investigation into the relationship between enhancement and ridge detection. In this paper, we thoroughly evaluate the pair-wise combinations of different curvilinear enhancement and ridge detection methods across two highly varied datasets, as well as samples of three other datasets. In particular, we present the approaches complementing one another and the gained insights, which will aid researchers in designing generic ridge detectors.