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I've been working for a while on a pet problem. The task is to identify and segment out the dark lines and possibly the wiggly ones too.

I'm not looking for anyone to solve this problem for me...I'm just at the point where I feel I'm losing my footing and could benefit from some ideas!

I've so far focussed on neural networks with varying degrees of not-super-success. The nns haven't given much more success than some threshholding. I have tried edge detection but the results look messy. A shrink, laplace, expand showed some promise. Hough transforms...it seems they should work but not yet(for me, anyway).

thanks.