A new contour coherence based thinning algorithm

A new contour-coherence based thinning algorithm is proposed in this paper. In the algorithm, the connectivity template is improved to avoid abnormal broken points. This algorithm only requires one time pre-scanning and all the pixels to be processed are determined by the contour-coherence criterion. The searching time and judgement time, therefore, is shortened by the algorithm so that the processing speed increases considerably. The topological property preservation of this algorithm is better than that of the classical thinning algorithm. This algorithm can guarantee that all the extracted skeletons are single-pixel wide which is very important for the automatic recognition of paper-map.<>