7,755 research outputs found
Fast and robust curve skeletonization for real-world elongated objects
We consider the problem of extracting curve skeletons of three-dimensional,
elongated objects given a noisy surface, which has applications in agricultural
contexts such as extracting the branching structure of plants. We describe an
efficient and robust method based on breadth-first search that can determine
curve skeletons in these contexts. Our approach is capable of automatically
detecting junction points as well as spurious segments and loops. All of that
is accomplished with only one user-adjustable parameter. The run time of our
method ranges from hundreds of milliseconds to less than four seconds on large,
challenging datasets, which makes it appropriate for situations where real-time
decision making is needed. Experiments on synthetic models as well as on data
from real world objects, some of which were collected in challenging field
conditions, show that our approach compares favorably to classical thinning
algorithms as well as to recent contributions to the field.Comment: 47 pages; IEEE WACV 2018, main paper and supplementary materia
The fully connected N-dimensional skeleton: probing the evolution of the cosmic web
A method to compute the full hierarchy of the critical subsets of a density
field is presented. It is based on a watershed technique and uses a probability
propagation scheme to improve the quality of the segmentation by circumventing
the discreteness of the sampling. It can be applied within spaces of arbitrary
dimensions and geometry. This recursive segmentation of space yields, for a
-dimensional space, a succession of -dimensional subspaces that
fully characterize the topology of the density field. The final 1D manifold of
the hierarchy is the fully connected network of the primary critical lines of
the field : the skeleton. It corresponds to the subset of lines linking maxima
to saddle points, and provides a definition of the filaments that compose the
cosmic web as a precise physical object, which makes it possible to compute any
of its properties such as its length, curvature, connectivity etc... When the
skeleton extraction is applied to initial conditions of cosmological N-body
simulations and their present day non linear counterparts, it is shown that the
time evolution of the cosmic web, as traced by the skeleton, is well accounted
for by the Zel'dovich approximation. Comparing this skeleton to the initial
skeleton undergoing the Zel'dovich mapping shows that two effects are competing
during the formation of the cosmic web: a general dilation of the larger
filaments that is captured by a simple deformation of the skeleton of the
initial conditions on the one hand, and the shrinking, fusion and disappearance
of the more numerous smaller filaments on the other hand. Other applications of
the N dimensional skeleton and its peak patch hierarchy are discussed.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA
Correcting curvature-density effects in the Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton
The Hainilton-Jacobi approach has proven to be a powerful and elegant method for extracting the skeleton of two-dimensional (2-D) shapes. The approach is based on the observation that the normalized flux associated with the inward evolution of the object boundary at nonskeletal points tends to zero as the size of the integration area tends to zero, while the flux is negative at the locations of skeletal points. Nonetheless, the error in calculating the flux on the image lattice is both limited by the pixel resolution and also proportional to the curvature of the boundary evolution front and, hence, unbounded near endpoints. This makes the exact location of endpoints difficult and renders the performance of the skeleton extraction algorithm dependent on a threshold parameter. This problem can be overcome by using interpolation techniques to calculate the flux with subpixel precision. However, here, we develop a method for 2-D skeleton extraction that circumvents the problem by eliminating the curvature contribution to the error. This is done by taking into account variations of density due to boundary curvature. This yields a skeletonization algorithm that gives both better localization and less susceptibility to boundary noise and parameter choice than the Hamilton-Jacobi method
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