Detection of linear structures in biological images

We present a method for detecting linear structures in biological microscopy images. The contribution of this paper is to unify the Beamlet transform with linear filtering techniques and propose a new detector, the feature-adpated beamlet transform. Our detector is able to incorporate knowledge about the desired line-profile lying along curves, like edges or ridges. We propose an efficient implementation in the case the profile is designed as a steerable filter. Preliminary results on biological images containing both edge- and ridge-like profiles have shown significant improvements over linear detector techniques and multiscale detection techniques based on traditional Beamlet transform.