A General Approach to Machine Perception of Linear Structure in Imaged Data

Abstract : In this paper, the authors address a basic problem in machine perception: the tracing of "line-like" structures appearing in an image. It is shown that this problem can be viewed as the process of finding skeletons in a gray-scale image after observing the following: (1) that line detection does not necessarily depend on gradient information, but rather is approachable from the standpoint of measuring total intensity variation; and (2) that smoothing the original image produces an approximate distance transform. An effective technique for extracting the delineating skeletons from an image is presented, and examples of this approach using aerial, industrial, and radiographic imagery are shown.