These steps organize the approach to extracting information about fiber data in 3-D volumetric datasets where the fibers are isolated from the matrix and other features.
- Label the Fibers
Erode the binary 3-D volume to about half of the expected radius of the fibers. Use a watershed method or something similar to bwlabeln
in Matlab to seed the fiber indices. Dilate the image with the same filter you used to erode it. Mask the dilated image with the binary image. The masking process will assure that the index fibers have the same shape of the original data.
There will be an issue with touching fibers when you dilate them. Dilation takes the maximum value in a filter window and assigns that to the pixel of interest. The largest index of touching fibers will overtake the lower index, but this should be easy to fix. There is a bit of uncertainty here that should