Hierarchical skeleton extraction based on a deformable particle system

The use of a particle system as a skeleton extractor is introduced here. This system behaves as an active contour model embedding variable topology properties. As the particles propagate inside tree-shaped objects, we build their skeleton which is useful to determine the neighborhoods used for the computation of the regularization and interaction forces. This connected skeleton is directly returned and avoids a two-step approach based on a morphological operation followed by a tree analysis. In addition, the method gives information on the hierarchy of structures. Using this method, it is possible to generate a cartography of structures such as veins or channels.