Connect Component Labeling (CCL) has been a fundamental operation in Computer Vision for decades. Most of the literature deals with 2D algorithms for applications like video surveillance or autonomous driving. Nonetheless, the need for 3D algorithms is rising, notably for medical imaging. While 2D CCL algorithms already generate large amounts of memory accesses and comparisons, 3D ones are even worse. This is the curse of dimensionality. Designing an efficient algorithm should address this problem. This paper introduces a segment-based algorithm for 3D labeling that uses a new strategy to accelerate label equivalence processing to mitigate the impact of higher dimensions. We claim that this new algorithm outperforms State-of-the-Art algorithms by a factor from ×1.5 up to ×3.1 for usual medical datasets and random images.

This article introduces a new connected component labeling and analysis algorithm framework that is able to compute in one pass the foreground and the background labels as well as the adjacency tree. The computation of features (bounding boxes, first statistical moments, Euler number) is done on-the-fly. The transitive closure enables an efficient hole processing that can be filled while their features are merged with the surrounding connected component without the need to rescan the image. A comparison with State-of-the-Art shows that this new algorithm can do all these computations faster than all existing algorithms processing foreground and background connected components or holes.