Segmentation of curvilinear structures such as vasculature and road networks is challenging due to relatively weak signals and complex geometry/topology.

Accurately restoring topology is both challenging and crucial in tubular structure extraction tasks, such as blood vessel segmentation and road network extraction. Diverging from traditional approaches based on pixel-level classification, our proposed method, named GraphMorph, focuses on branch-level features of tubular structures to achieve more topologically accurate predictions. GraphMorph comprises two main components: a Graph Decoder and a Morph Module. Utilizing multi-scale features extracted from an image patch by the segmentation network, the Graph Decoder facilitates the learning of branch-level features and generates a graph that accurately represents the tubular structure in this patch. The Morph Module processes two primary inputs: the graph and the centerline probability map, provided by the Graph Decoder and the segmentation network, respectively. Employing a novel SkeletonDijkstra algorithm, the Morph Module produces a centerline mask that aligns with the predicted graph. Furthermore, we observe that employing centerline masks predicted by GraphMorph significantly reduces false positives in the segmentation task, which is achieved by a simple yet effective post-processing strategy. The efficacy of our method in the centerline extraction and segmentation tasks has been substantiated through experimental evaluations across various datasets. Source code will be released soon.

Motion is a powerful cue that humans use to detect and segment visual objects.

Segmentation, the task of delineating and isolating distinct objects, is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Much of the current approaches are supervised, relying on expensive manual annotations.

Di Lin is the corresponding author of this paper.

Extended " T able 2" in submitted paper. Extended " T able 3" in submitted paper. We thank reviewers for their comments, and will carefully revise paper considering these comments. Q1 (R1): References and comparison with a baseline that learns embeddings only through a standard convnet. In Tab.2 of this rebuttal, the state-of-the-art method of AISI [7] also depends on We will give more details of these compared methods in paper for clarity.