[ITK Community] Isolating 3d touching regions

[Emiliano Pastorelli]

Hi All,

i'm quite new to ITK, and i'm trying to manipulate a 3d volume image 
representing some fibres floating in a block of concrete. Due to the 
scanning inaccuracies, some of them actually seem to "touch", also when 
they wouldn't be touching in the real dataset.

I tried to separate them in every way, through the Frangi Vesselness 
filters, and another bunch of attempts, but i don't seem to find a way 
to do it reasonably quickly and smartly.

http://www.kyb3.org/images/touchingFibres.png

in the picture, exactly in the center you see an example of how the 
touching area usually looks like (the dataset is already divide in 
labeled regions as label map as well).
I am pretty sure that some filter can do that, but for example i was 
taking a look at the connectedthresholdimagefilter and i couldn't really 
figure out if that's what i need, and in that case how i shall use the 
seeds (my software shall become flexible enough to deal with really 
similar in shapes but different in distribution, alignment and contact 
points datasets).

Does anybody have any idea that might spare me another couple of endless 
days like the last ones?

Thanks in advance,
Emiliano