Skeleton growing and pruning with bending potential ratio

We propose a novel significance measure for skeleton pruning, called bending potential ratio (BPR), in which the decision regarding whether a skeletal branch should be pruned or not is based on the context of the boundary segment that corresponds to the branch. By considering this contextual information, we can better evaluate the contribution of the boundary segment to the overall shape, which generally depends on its particular location within the whole contour (i.e., a segment may be considered to be insignificant in one place while it may be considered as a feature elsewhere). The BPR is a measure of the significance of contour segments in such context, and depicts the bending potential of a contour segment. Unlike other significance measures that only contain local shape information, the BPR evaluates both local and global shape information. Thus, it is insensitive to local boundary deformation. In addition, we also present a scheme for skeleton growing, which integrates pruning based on the BPR measurement. Our experiments demonstrate that the skeletons obtained by the proposed algorithm are medially placed and connected. We also demonstrate that shapes reconstructed from these skeletons are very close to the original shapes. Moreover, the BPR measure yields a natural multi-scale skeletal representation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.