Heat Kernel Smoothing in Irregular Image Domains

Abstract

We present the discrete version of heat kernel smoothing on graph data structure. The method is used to smooth data in an irregularly shaped domains in 3D images. New statistical properties are derived. As an application, we show how to filter out data in the lung blood vessel trees obtained from computed tomography. The method can be further used in representing the complex vessel trees parametrically and extracting the skeleton representation of the trees.