Skin image segmentation based on energy transformation.

In this paper, a new method on extraction of human skin grid centerlines is proposed. The method introduces the physics concepts of kinetic and potential energy into image processing. Regional energy is calculated. Energy transformation is performed to map the pixels from the grayscale space into energy space. Then, the energy image undergoes a morphological filter to remove noises and spurious minima. The amount of filtering can be manually tuned to get a different result. Subsequently, normal curvature of the energy surface is utilized to identify the principal direction and principal curvatures. The ridge centerlines can be detected at the image locations where the principal direction is perpendicular to the normal vector. The experiment shows that this method is an effective one for the purpose of extracting human skin grid.

[1]  Jean Serra.  Principles of Mathematical Morphology , 1988 .

[2]  John M. Gauch,et al.  Multiresolution Analysis of Ridges and Valleys in Grey-Scale Images , 1993, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[3]  Pierre Soille,et al.  An Efficient Algorithm for Drainage Network Extraction on DEMs , 1994, J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent..

[4]  Robert M. Haralick,et al.  Ridges and valleys on digital images , 1983, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[5]  J. Serra,et al.  An overview of morphological filtering , 1992 .

[6]  Alexis Gourdon,et al.  Computing the Differential Characteristics of Isointensity Surfaces , 1995, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[7]  Glynn P. Robinson,et al.  Scale and segmentation of grey-level images using maximum gradient paths , 1991, Image Vis. Comput..

[8]  R. Lee,et al.  Two-Dimensional Critical Point Configuration Graphs , 1984, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[9]  Paul L. Rosin.  Early Image Representation by Slope Districts , 1995, J. Vis. Commun. Image Represent..

[10]  David H. Eberly,et al.  Ridges for image analysis , 1994, Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision.

[11]  John F. O'Callaghan,et al.  The extraction of drainage networks from digital elevation data , 1984, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[12]  Jan J. Koenderink,et al.  Local features of smooth shapes: ridges and courses , 1993, Optics & Photonics.

[13]  P. J. J. Desmet,et al.  Comparison of Routing Algorithms for Digital Elevation Models and Their Implications for Predicting Ephemeral Gullies , 1996, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[14]  Luc Vincent,et al.  Watersheds in Digital Spaces: An Efficient Algorithm Based on Immersion Simulations , 1991, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..