Surface and curve skeleton from a structure tensor analysis applied on mastoid air cells in human temporal bones

The mastoid of human temporal bone contains numerous air cells connected to each others. In order to gain further knowledge about these air cells, a more compact representation is needed to obtain an estimate of the size distribution of these cells. Already existing skeletonization methods often fail in producing a faithful skeleton mostly due to noise hampering the binary representation of the data. This paper proposes a different approach by extracting geometrical information embedded in the Euclidean distance transform of a volume via a structure tensor analysis based on quadrature filters, from which a secondary structure tensor allows the extraction of surface skeleton along with a curve skeleton from its eigenvalues. Preliminary results obtained on a X-ray micro-CT scans of a human temporal bone show very promising results.