Customized Hough transform for robust segmentation of cervical vertebrae from X-ray images

This paper addresses the issues involved in developing a robust segmentation technique capable of finding the location and orientation of the cervical vertebrae in X-ray images. This technique should be invariant to rotation, scale, noise, occlusions and shape variability. A customized approach, based on the generalized Hough transform (GHT), that captures shape variability and exploits shape information embedded in the accumulator structure to overcome noise and occlusions is proposed. This approach effectively finds estimates of the location and orientation of the cervical vertebrae boundaries in digitized X-ray images.