Using grey-level and distance information for medial surface representation of volume images

A medial surface representation of a grey-level volume image is computed. The foreground is reduced to a subset topologically equivalent to the initial foreground and mainly consisting of surfaces centred within regions having locally higher intensities, here, regarded as more informative. This result is obtained by combining distance information with grey-level information. A surface skeleton is first computed, where excessive shortening is prevented by a regularity condition defined on the distance transform. The structure of the surface skeleton is then simplified by removing some peripheral surfaces, so obtaining the desired medial surface representation.