Tensor voting: Current state, challenges and new trends in the context of medical image analysis

Abstract

Perceptual organisation techniques aim at mimicking the human visual system for extracting salient information from noisy images. Tensor voting has been one of the most versatile of those methods, with many different applications both in computer vision and medical image analysis. Its strategy consists in propagating local information encoded through tensors by means of perception-inspired rules. Although it has been used for more than a decade, there are still many unsolved theoretical issues that have made it challenging to apply it to more problems, especially in analysis of medical images. Themain aim of this chapter is to review the current state of the research in tensor voting, to summarise its present challenges, and to describe the new trends that we foresee will drive the research in this field in the next few years. Also, we discuss extensions of tensor voting that could lead to potential performance improvements and that could make it suitable for further medical applications.