R-PLUS: a Riemannian anisotropic edge detection scheme for vascular segmentation.

In this paper, detection of edges in oriented fields is addressed. In some applications such as vessel segmentation because of the intrinsic orientation of the structures, edge detection is only demanded in a particular subspace. This is specially usefull when a curve evolution is chosen for segmentation since gradients in parallel to vessel orientation may stop the contour. An anisotropic edge detection scheme is generalized on a Riemannian manifold using the local structure tensor. The method is the generalization of the PLUS operator proposed for accurate curved edge detection. Examples are given and the comparison is made with the state-of-the-art flux maximizing flow which indicates that significant improvements in terms of leakage minimization and thiner vessel delineation is achievable using our methodology.