Ridge–based curvilinear structure detection for identifying road in remote sensing image and backbone in neuron dendrite image

The curvilinear structure detection is widely applied in many real tasks, such as the fiber classification, river finding, blood vessel detection, and so on. In this paper, we proposed to use the ridge-based curvilinear structure detection (RCSD) for the road extraction from the remote sensing images. First, we employed the morphology trivial opening operation to filter out almost all the small clusters of noise and the small paths. Then RCSD was used to find the road from the remote sensing images. The experiments showed that our proposed method is efficient and give better results than the current existing road-detection methods. Considering the similar structure between backbone in the neuron dendrite images and the road in remote sensing images, we extended the application of RCSD to the backbone detection in neuron dendrite images. The results on backbone detection also proved the efficiency of RCSD.