Grey-level hit-or-miss transforms—part II: Application to angiographic image processing

The hit-or-miss transform (HMT) is a fundamental operation on binary images, widely used since 40 years. As it is not increasing, its extension to grey-level images is not straightforward, and very few authors have considered it. Moreover, despite its potential usefulness, very few applications of the grey-level HMT have been proposed until now. Part I of this paper [B. Naegel, N. Passat, C. Ronse, Grey-level hit-or-miss transforms—part I: unified theory. Pattern Recogn., in press doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2006.06.004] was devoted to the description of a theory enabling to unify the main definitions of the grey-level HMT, mainly proposed by Ronse and Soille, respectively. Part II of this paper, developed hereafter, deals with the applicative potential of the grey-level HMT, illustrated by its use for vessel segmentation from 3D angiographic data. Different HMT-based segmentation methods are then described and analysed, leading to concrete analysis techniques for brain and liver vessels, but also providing algorithmic strategies which could further be used for many other kinds of image processing applications.