Dark line detection with line width extraction

Automated line detection is a classical image processing topic with many applications such as road detection in remote images and vessel detection in medical images. Many traditional line detectors, such as Gabor filter, the second order derivative of Gaussian and Radon transform will response not only to lines but also to edges, e.g. they will give high responses to the edges of bright lines or blobs when only dark lines are required. To reduce false detections when extracting only dark (or bright) lines, in this paper we propose a line detector by using the first derivative of Gaussian. It can detect dark lines without much false detection on blobs or bright lines. Meanwhile, the proposed method can estimate line width simultaneously. Experiments on various images are performed to test the proposed algorithm.