Reconstructing loopy curvilinear structures using integer programming

Reconstructing loopy curvilinear structures using integer programming

Turetken E, Benmansour F, Andres B, Pfister H, and Fua P.

Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2013.

We propose a novel approach to automated delineation of linear structures that form complex and potentially loopy networks. This is in contrast to earlier approaches that usually assume a tree topology for the networks. At the heart of our method is an Integer Programming formulation that allows us to find the global optimum of an objective function designed to allow cycles but penalize spurious junctions and early terminations. We demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on a wide range of datasets.