Veinerization: A New Shape Description for Flexible Skeletonization

We introduce the new concept of "veinerization", which produces a graph that contains all the "topological" information needed to derive a wide variety of skeletons. Theoretically, the main contribution is to provide a homogeneous framework for integration of the major concepts described in other related works on digital skeletonization. In practice, the new aspect of this approach is to provide the user with different criteria for selecting the most suitable skeleton for a given application, e.g., the user can select a suitable threshold for obtaining the desirable balance between " having a skeleton without noisy prunes" and "having a skeleton that reflects the initial shape". This algorithm has been tested on numerous kinds of patterns, including pathological ones like fractal sets well-known for the complexity of their shapes.

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