A fast algorithm for computation of discrete Euclidean distance transform in three or more dimensions on vector processing architectures

In this note, we introduce a function for calculating Euclidean distance transform in large binary images of dimension three or higher in Matlab. This function uses transparent and fast line-scan algorithm that can be efficiently implemented on vector processing architectures such as Matlab and significantly outperforms the Matlab’s standard distance transform function “bwdist” both in terms of the computation time and the possible data sizes. The described function also can be used to calculate the distance transform of the data with anisotropic voxel aspect ratios. These advantages make this function especially useful for high-performance scientific and engineering applications that require distance transform calculations for large multidimensional and/or anisotropic datasets in Matlab. The described function is publicly available from the Matlab Central website under the name “bwdistsc”, “Euclidean Distance Transform for Variable Data Aspect Ratio”.