Skeletonisation Scale-Spaces

Abstract

The medial axis transform is a well-known tool for shape recognition. Instead of the object contour, it equivalently describes a binary object in terms of a skeleton containing all centres of maximal inscribed discs. While this shape descriptor is useful for many applications, it is also sensitive to noise: Small boundary perturbations can result in large unwanted expansions of the skeleton. Pruning offers a remedy by removing unwanted skeleton parts. In our contribution, we generalise this principle to skeleton sparsification: We show that subsequently removing parts of the skeleton simplifies the associated shape in a hierarchical manner that obeys scale-space properties. To this end, we provide both a continuous and discrete theory that incorporates architectural and simplification statements as well as invariances. We illustrate how our skeletonisation scale-spaces can be employed for practical applications with two proof-of-concept implementations for pruning and compression.