A constrained region growing approach based on watershed for the segmentation of low contrast structures in bone micro-CT images

Quantitative synchrotron micro-CT makes it possible to visualize remodeling zones having different mineral concentrations within bone tissue. However, so far their segmentation has only been performed by simple thresholding which is insufficient due to noise and weak contrast. In this paper, we propose a new customized region growing approach to segment each remodeling zone taking into account some biological prior. A constrained region growing strategy based on distance map and watershed is developed to control the shape of the detected regions. The statistical analysis of the results on synthetic noisy images and the application to experimental micro-CT data show the efficiency of the method.