Extraction of vessel structures from medical images can be useful for investigation of endothelial function or hypervascularization. libfrangi is an implementation of a standard vesselness filter often used in various imaging modalities. It can also be used in hyperspectral imaging (A. Bjorgan et al. (2015) “Vessel contrast enhancement in hyperspectral images”, Proc. SPIE vol. 9318)

A suitable implementation of this filter was already available as a MATLAB package. libfrangi represents a procedure-oriented C++ implementation. MATLAB calls were manually converted to equivalent OpenCV calls. It should also be possible to convert this code to pure C using OpenCV’s C interface.

libfrangi provides an interface for supplying OpenCV Mat images and obtaining a vesselness measure, a measure of vessel scale and vessel direction. All image operations are implemented using OpenCV calls, which can provide a high performance to the algorithm. The results were found to be comparable to the original MATLAB scripts.