Piecewise linear skeletonization using principal curves
Kegl, B.
Krzyzak, A.
Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Operational Res., Montreal Univ., Que.;
This paper appears in: Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on
Publication Date: Jan 2002
Volume: 24,
Issue: 1
On page(s): 59-74
ISSN: 0162-8828
References Cited: 29
CODEN: ITPIDJ
INSPEC Accession Number: 7165081
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/34.982884
Current Version Published: 2002-08-07
Abstract
Proposes an algorithm to find piecewise linear skeletons of
handwritten characters by using principal curves. The development of the
method was inspired by the apparent similarity between the definition of
principal curves (smooth curves which pass through the "middle" of a
cloud of points) and medial axes (smooth curves that run equidistantly
from the contours of a character image). The central
fitting-and-smoothing step of the algorithm is an extension of the
polygonal line algorithm, which approximates principal curves of data
sets by piecewise linear curves. The polygonal line algorithm is
extended to find principal graphs and complemented with two steps
specific to the task of skeletonization: an initialization method to
capture the approximate topology of the character, and a collection of
restructuring operations to improve the structural quality of the
skeleton produced by the initialization method. An advantage of our
approach over existing methods is that we optimize the skeleton graph by
minimizing an intuitive and explicit objective function that captures
the two competing criteria of smoothing the skeleton and fitting it
closely to the pixels of the character image. We tested the algorithm on
isolated handwritten digits and images of continuous handwriting. The
results indicated that the proposed algorithm can find a smooth medial
axis in the great majority of a wide variety of character templates and
that it substantially improves the pixel-wise skeleton obtained by
traditional thinning methods
Index
Terms
Available to subscribers and IEEE members.
References
Available to subscribers and IEEE members.
Citing Documents
Available to subscribers and IEEE members.
Cart
