Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Thinning (morphology)

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Thinning is the transformation of a digital image into a simplified, but topologically equivalent image. It is a type of topological skeleton, but computed using mathematical morphology operators.

Example

Let E = Z 2 , and consider the eight composite structuring elements, composed by:

C 1 = { ( 0 , 0 ) , ( 1 , 1 ) , ( 0 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 1 ) } and D 1 = { ( 1 , 1 ) , ( 0 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 1 ) } , C 2 = { ( 1 , 0 ) , ( 0 , 0 ) , ( 1 , 1 ) , ( 0 , 1 ) } and D 2 = { ( 0 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 0 ) }

and the three rotations of each by 90 o , 180 o , and 270 o . The corresponding composite structuring elements are denoted B 1 , , B 8 .

For any i between 1 and 8, and any binary image X, define

where denotes the set-theoretical difference and denotes the hit-or-miss transform.

The thinning of an image A is obtained by cyclically iterating until convergence:

A B 1 B 2 B 8 B 1 B 2 .

References

Thinning (morphology) Wikipedia