Hierarchical segmentation of cervical and lumbar vertebrae using a customized generalized Hough transform and extensions to active appearance models

The paper describes a semi-automatic segmentation method for application to cervical and lumbar X-ray images. The method consists of a three stage, coarse to fine, segmentation process utilizing the generalised Hough transform for one stage, and active appearance models for two stages. Customizations to these algorithms are introduced, and segmentation results for 273 cervical X-ray images and 262 lumbar X-ray images are presented.