Permanence-based shape decomposition in binary pyramids

An algorithm to decompose hierarchically bidimensional patterns is introduced. The single-scale input pattern is first transformed into a multi-scale data set. The multi-resolution skeleton is then computed and its hierarchical decomposition is obtained by using the notion of permanence. A constrained reverse distance transformation is applied to the skeleton components to reconstruct the regions into which the pattern is decomposed. A merging process then reduces the number of components to the most significant ones and improves decomposition stability.