RECONSTRUCTABLE PARALLEL THINNING

Abstract

This paper describes a reconstructable thinning process which is based on one-pass parallel thinning and the morphological skeleton transformation. It reduces a binary digital pattern into a unit-width connected skeleton enabling perfect reconstruction of the original pattern. The process uses thinning templates to iteratively remove boundary pixels and structuring templates of the morphological skeleton transformation to retain critical feature pixels for reconstruction. The thinning templates together with the extracted feature pixels ensure skeletal connectivity, unit width, and reconstructability. These essential properties are guaranteed regardless of the chosen structuring templates used in the morphological skeleton transformation. The thinning process is analyzed and results are presented. A number of implementation issues, such as the choice of structuring templates, the computational model, noise filtering, and computational efficiency, are also addressed.