A Hybrid Distance Map Based and Morphologic Thinning Algorithm

A lot of applications need that an object is transformed into its medial axis while preserving its topology. In this paper we present a thinning algorithm based on special masks preserving connectivity. The thinning process is controled by a distance map to overcome problems of a former approach. As a result we obtain a skeleton that has minor artefacts only and which is suitable in the field of blood vessel analysis. We are providing results on synthetic and real images that are compared with another approach.