MAT-Based Thinning for Line Patterns

Abstract

Reducing branching effect and increasing boundary noise immunity are of great importance for thinning patterns. An approach based on medial axis transform (MAT) to obtain a connected 1-pixel wide skeleton with few redundant branches is presented in this paper. Though the obtained skeleton by MAT is isotropic with few redundant branches, however, the skeleton points are usually disconnected. In order to rend the merits of the MAT and avoid its disadvantages, the proposed approach is composed of distance-map generation, grouping, ridge-path linking, and refining to obtain the connected 1-pixel wide thin line. The ridge-path linking strategy can guarantee the skeletons connected, whereas the refining process can be readily performed by a conventional thinning process to obtain the 1-pixel wide thinned pattern. The performances investigated by branching effect, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and measurement of skeleton deviation (MSD) confirm the feasibility of the proposed MAT-based thinning for line patterns.