Alpha-tree segmentation of human anatomical photographic imagery

Abstract

Segmentation of anatomical imagery is important in several areas, such as forensics, medical analysis and educational material. The manual segmentation of such images and the subsequent labelling of regions is a very laborious task. We propose an interactive segmentation scheme which we evaluate on a new data set of anatomical imagery. We use a morphological tree-based segmentation method, known as the alpha-tree, together with a Hu-moment thresholding mechanism in order to extract segments from a number of structures. Both qualitative and quantitative results in anatomical imagery of embalmed head, arm and leg specimens indicate that the proposed method can produce meaningful segmentation outputs, which could facilitate further refined labelling.