Morphological skeleton representation and coding of binary images

This paper presents a preliminary study on using Mathematical Morphology to represent and code a binary or a grey-tone image by parts of its skeleton, a thinned version of the image. An image can be uniquely decomposed into skeleton components, and then reconstructed by dilating these components. Since, for a certain category of imagery, the skeleton components possess a lower entropy than the original image, a run-length or entropy coding scheme can be used to achieve representation or transmission of the image at a lower information rate than originally required.