A new strategy for skeleton pruning

A new pruning algorithm is introduced to simplify the structure of the skeleton of 2D objects, without affecting significantly the representative power of the skeleton. The concatenations of skeleton branches originating from the end points of the skeleton are examined while building a hierarchical skeleton structure. Skeleton branches that can be interpreted as peripheral branches at any hierarchical level are concatenated with the adjacent skeleton branches that were interpreted as peripheral branches at the immediately previous level. A concatenation extends in the hierarchy for a number of levels related to the number of branch points connecting the successive branches along the concatenation itself. The most internal branch point up to which a concatenation can be pruned without affecting the representative power of the skeleton is determined by using significance measures able to evaluate the loss in object recovery produced by pruning that part of the concatenation. Pruning is performed by removing all the so identified longest prunable concatenations, provided that topology is maintained (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.