Voronoi Skeletons: Theory and Applications

Abstract

The paper presents a novel method of robust skeletonization based on the Voronoi diagram (VD) of boundary points, which is characterized by correct Euclidean metrics and inherent preservation of connectivity. The regularization of the Voronoi medial axis (VMA) in the sense of Blum's prairie fire analogy is done by attributing each component of the VMA with a measure of prominence and stability. The resulting Voronoi skeletons (VSK) appear largely invariant with respect to typical noise conditions in the image and geometric transformations. Hierarchical clustering of the skeleton branches, the so-called skeleton pyramid, leads to further simplification of the skeleton. Several applications demonstrate the suitability of the Voronoi skeleton to higher order tasks such as object recognition. 1 Introduction During the last decades, skeletonization or thinning has been a constant research topic. The concept of skeletonization denotes a process, which transforms a 2D object into a 1D lin..