A Medial Axis Transformation for Grayscale Pictures

1 July 1982

journal article
Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Vol. PAMI-4 (4) , 419-421
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.1982.4767274

Abstract

Blum's medial axis transformation (MAT) for binary pictures yields medial axis points that lie midway between opposite borders of a region or along angle bisectors. This note discusses a generalization of the MAT in which a score is computed for each point P of a grayscale picture based on the gradient magnitudes at pairs of points that have P as their midpoint. These scores are high at points that lie midway between pairs of antiparallel edges or along angle bisectors, so that they define a MAT-like ``skeleton,'' which we may call the GRADMAT. However, this skeleton is rather sensitive to the presence of noise edges or to irregularities in the region edges, and it also is subject to artifacts created by pairs of edges belonging to different objects.

Keywords

This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:

The line-skeleton
Computer Graphics and Image Processing, 1979
Piecewise Approximation of Pictures Using Maximal Neighborhoods
IEEE Transactions on Computers, 1978
A grey-weighted skeleton
Information and Control, 1970