Supervised Manifold Distance Segmentation

We present a simple and robust method for image and volume data segmentation based on manifold distance metrics. This is done by treating the image as a function that maps the 2D (image) or 3D (volume) to a 2D or 3D manifold in a higher dimensional feature space. We explore a range of possible feature spaces, including value, gradient, and probabilistic measures, and examine the consequences of including these measures in the feature space. The time and space computational complexity of our segmentation algorithm is O(N), which allows interactive, user-centric segmentation even for large data sets. We show that this method, given appropriate choice of feature vector, produces results both qualitatively and quantitatively similar to Level Sets, Random Walkers, and others. We validate the robustness of this segmentation scheme with comparisons to standard ground-truth models and sensitivity analysis of the algorithm.