Crease enhancement diffusion

Ridge and valley structures are important image features, especially in oriented textures. Usually, the extraction of these structures requires a prefiltering step to regularize the source image. In this paper, we show that classical diffusion-based filters are not always appropriate for this task and propose a new filtering process. This new filter can be interpreted as an example of introducing the intrinsic image structure in a diffusion process. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science (USA).