A THINNING ALGORITHM BASED ON THE FORCE BETWEEN CHARGED PARTICLES

Abstract

A new thinning algorithm based on the well known concept of the force of attraction or repulsion between charged particles is presented. This algorithm generates connected skeletons which preserve the shape and end-points of the original patterns. Its performance is experimentally compared with four other known algorithms published in the literature. For the sake of comparison, a reasoned set of test data is introduced. The results of our comparison reveal that the proposed CPM (Charge Particle Method) algorithm is almost as fast as the fastest of those compared. For thin images obtainable from low resolution scanners or coarse scanned images, the CPM algorithm is the fastest.