Robust skeletonization using the discrete lambda-medial axis

John Chaussard (1) , Michel Couprie (1) , Hugues Talbot (1)

1 LIGM - Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge

Medial axes and skeletons are notoriously sensitive to contour irregularities. This lack of stability is a serious problem for applications in e.g. shape analysis and recognition. In 2005, Chazal and Lieutier introduced the λ-medial axis as a new concept for computing the medial axis of a shape subject to single parameter filtering. The λ-medial axis is stable under small shape perturbations, as proved by these authors. In this article, a discrete λ-medial axis (DLMA) is introduced and compared with the recently introduced integer medial axis (GIMA). We show that DLMA provides measurably better results than GIMA, with regard to stability and sensibility to rotations. We provide efficient algorithms to compute the DLMA, and we also introduce a variant of the DLMA which may be computed in linear-time.

Mots clés: Stability

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Mathématique discrète [cs.DM]

John Chaussard, Michel Couprie, Hugues Talbot. Robust skeletonization using the discrete lambda-medial axis. Pattern Recognition Letters, 2011, 32 (9), pp.1384-1394. ⟨10.1016/j.patrec.2010.09.002⟩. ⟨hal-00622523⟩