Extension of the minimal path searching for structure recovery

A generalization of the notion of minimal path is presented in order to retrieve the structure of tree-like objects when using grayscale images. More particularly, we extend the notion of the regularization term used in an active contour model. As the energy function proposed does not strictly increase with the distance, the path propagates inside the object, even in the case of a curved object. Then, a classical classification algorithm is proposed to generate the cartography of a tree shaped-object structure. This algorithm is computed using the dissimilarity matrix obtained by searching the minimal paths between a set of given start points. Finally, we show the results obtained on aerial and biomedical images