Ridge and valley enhancing filters are widely used in applications such as vessel detection in medical image computing. When images are degraded by noise or include vessels at different scales, such filters are an essential step for meaningful and stable vessel localization. In this work, we propose a novel multi-scale anisotropic fourth-order diffusion equation that allows us to smooth along vessels, while sharpening them in the orthogonal direction. The proposed filter uses a fourth-order diffusion tensor whose eigentensors and eigenvalues are determined from the local Hessian matrix, at a scale that is automatically selected for each pixel. We discuss efficient implementation using a fast explicit diffusion scheme and demonstrate results on synthetic images and vessels in fundus images. Compared to previous isotropic and anisotropic fourth-order filters, as well as established second-order vessel enhancing filters, our newly proposed one better restores the centerlines in all cases.
@cite_18: Fourth-order nonlinear diffusion filters used for image noise removal are mainly isotropic filters. It means that the spatially varying diffusivity determined by a diffusion function is applied on the image regardless of the orientation of its local features. However, the optimal choice of parameters in the numerical solver of these filters for having a minimal distortion of the image features results in forming speckle noise on the denoised image and a very slow convergence rate especially when the noise level is moderately high. In this paper, a new fourth-order nonlinear diffusion filter is introduced, which has an anisotropic behavior on the image features. In the proposed filter, it is shown that a suitable choice for a set of diffusivity functions to unevenly control the strength of the diffusion on the directions of the level set and gradient leads to a good edge preservation capability compared to the other diffusion or regularization filters. The comparison of the results obtained by the proposed filter with those of the other second and fourth-order filters shows that the proposed method produces a noticeable improvement in the quality of denoised images evaluated subjectively and quantitatively.
We generalize this approach to a novel anisotropic fourth-order diffusion equation that smoothes along the crease, while creating a sharp peak in the orthogonal direction, to clearly indicate its center. We are aware of only one previous formulation of anisotropic fourth order diffusion, proposed by Hajiaboli @cite_18 . However, it has been designed to preserve edges, rather than enhance creases. Consequently, it is not well-suited for our purposes, as we will demonstrate in the results. Moreover, it differs from our approach in that it does not make use of a fourth-order diffusion tensor, and includes no mechanism for scale selection.