Local SURF-based Keypoint Transfer Segmentation

Abstract

This paper presents an improvement of the keypoint transfer method for the segmentation of 3D medical images. Our approach is based on 3D SURF keypoint extraction, instead of 3D SIFT in the original algorithm. This yields a significantly higher number of keypoints, which allows to use a local segmentation transfer approach. The resulting segmentation accuracy is significantly increased, and smaller organs can be segmented correctly. We also propose a keypoint selection step which provides a good balance between speed and accuracy. We illustrate the efficiency of our approach with comparisons against state of the art methods.