Finding regional extrema - methods and performance

Abstract

Finding regional extrema of images is an important step in a number of morphological algorithms, such as some versions of the watershed transform\footnote{This work started because we were trying to compare different watershed algorithms}. Regional extrema may also be important cues of other tasks, such as splitting objects based on distance transform information. This report provides an overview of the methods available in ITK and compares the performance with a new filter.