Title
On Using Anisotropic Diffusion for Skeleton Extraction
Abstract
We present a novel and effective skeletonization algorithm for binary and gray-scale images, based on the anisotropic heat diffusion analogy. We diffuse the image in the direction normal to the feature boundaries and also allow tangential diffusion (curvature decreasing diffusion) to contribute slightly. The proposed anisotropic diffusion provides a high quality medial function in the image: it removes noise and preserves prominent curvatures of the shape along the level-sets (skeleton features). The skeleton strength map, which provides the likelihood of a point to be part of the skeleton, is defined by the mean curvature measure. Finally, thin and binary skeleton is obtained by non-maxima suppression and hysteresis thresholding of the skeleton strength map. Our method outperforms the most related and the popular methods in skeleton extraction especially in noisy conditions. Results show that the proposed approach is better at handling noise in images and preserving the skeleton features at the centerline of the shape.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/s11263-012-0540-9
International Journal of Computer Vision
Keywords
Field
DocType
Skeletonization,Feature extraction,Heat flow,Computer vision
Anisotropic diffusion,Computer vision,Morphological skeleton,Curvature,Computer science,Mean curvature,Topological skeleton,Feature extraction,Skeletonization,Artificial intelligence,Thresholding,Geometry
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
100
2
0920-5691
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.49
26
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
C. Direkoğlu18413.31
Rozenn Dahyot234032.62
Michael Manzke3449.19