Study of skeletons using various preprocessing methods

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K. Umashankar, 2N.Suvarna Lakshmi Durga
1&2
Member- SR Research Forum
Dept of CSE
GIET, Rajahmundry
E-mail Address: uma220045@gmail.com sweetysiri555@gmail.com

Abstract:
The present paper describes various mechanisms of converting a grey level image
into binary image. Most of the packages or image processing softwares are capable in
generating the binary image from grey level values of pixels. But the problem in these
packages or softwares is they do not reveal the method of conversion. And more over
various preprocessing measures are required for proper image analysis, understanding
etc. to monitor this problem the present paper investigated hoe the skeletons are going to
be affected on various preprocessing methods. The present paper presents innovative
preprocessing methods which are applied on medical image. A good comparison is made
between these methods.
Key words: grey level image, binary image, histograms, preprocessing measures, image
analysis.
INTRODUCTION:
Thinning and skeletonization have numerous applications in image analysis and
computer vision. For several of these applications significant amount of information is
lost during the process of binarization. Applying thinning directly to gray scale images is
motivated by the desire of directly processing images with gray levels distributed over a
range of intensity values. This will avoid shape distortions that may irremediably affect
the presence of features in the binary image generated even if an optimal thresholding
algorithm is used to produce the binary image. The gray skeleton is a connected subset of
a gray scale pattern which consists of a network of lines and arcs centrally placed along
local higher intensity regions. Unfortunately, there is no one single agreed upon
definition for gray skeletons [1], [2], [4].

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 Skeletons are classically associated as a medial axis representation that is
regenerative (i.e. could be used to generate the object back exactly). Skeletons are not
easily digitizable. It is not possible to have a representation that is a medial axis,
preserves connectivity, preserves homotopy and exists on the square digital grid. One of
these four restrictions has to be relaxed. This has opened the way to several
approximations known as thinning.
one can group most of the published algorithms under one of two approaches. The
first approach considers the image as a continuous surface in the 3D Euclidean space and
use the first and second partial derivatives of this surface to assign the proper
topographical label to each pixel [3], [5]. The second approach is based on the repeated
application of a removal process that erodes the gray scale pattern until only one pixel
thick subset is obtained in the center of the high intensity region. The algorithm proposed
in this paper is a parallel thinning algorithm that preserves connectivity and belongs to
the latter family. We have devised a set of conditions that guarantee that the resulting
thinned version is connected and as close as possible to the medial axis. The algorithm
has been tested on a variety of images from different applications and produced
satisfactory results that proved to be useful for compression and recognition applications
which will be reported elsewhere.
METHODOLOGY:
The present section briefly outlines the various methods of converting grey level
image into preprocessed grey levels. The basic structure of this conversion is outlined in
figure 1. The preprocessed grey level image is converted into binary by global average.

Figure 1: Block diagram for skeletanization of preprocessed binary image

A binary image can be obtained by various preprocessing methods. The present
paper taken into consideration the following preprocessing methods applied on local
neighborhoods, which are listed below.local maximum ,local minimum, mode, median ,
mean and ((max-min )/2 ).

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RESULTS:

Fig 1(a) Fig 1(b) Fig 1(c)

Fig 2(a) Fig 2(b) Fig 2(c)

Fig 3(a) Fig 3(b) Fig 3(c)

Fig 4(a) Fig 4(b) Fig 4(c)

Fig 5(a) Fig 5(b) Fig 5(c)

Fig 6(a) Fig 6(b) Fig 6(c)

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 Fig 7(a) Fig 7(b) Fig 7(c)

Fig 1(a): Original Image 1(b): Binary Image 1(c): Skeleton

Fig 2(a): Local Maximum 2(b): Binary Image 2(c): Skeleton
Fig 3(a): Local Minimum 3(b): Binary Image 3(c): Skeleton
Fig 4(a): Local (Max-Min)/2 4(b): Binary Image 4(c): Skeleton
Fig 5(a): Local Mean 5(b): Binary Image 5(c): Skeleton
Fig 6(a): Local Median 6(b): Binary Image 6(c): Skeleton
Fig 7(a): Local Mode 7(b): Binary Image 7(c): Skeleton

CONCLUSIONS
The present paper concludes that there are n numbers of preprocessing methods
which can be further expanded. From the results it is clearly evident that a good skeleton
is obtained for (max-min)/2 preprocessing method. The final conclusion is “one can not
say which preprocessing method is superior; this depends upon the type of image, the
way the grey levels are spread, and type of application. There fore the present paper
recommends it is better to choose one of the preprocessing methods by applying and
comparing each instead depending upon a constant method.
REFERENCES
[1] Abe, K., Mizutani, F. and Wang, C., “Thinning of grayscale images with combined
sequential and parallel conditions for pixel removal”, IEEE Trans. on Systems Man
Cybernetics, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 294-299, Feb. 1994.
[2] Arcelli, C. and Ramella, G., ”Finding grey-skeletons by iterated pixel removal”,
Image and Vision Computing, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 159-267, Apr. 1995.
[3] Chen, S. and Shih, F., “Skeletonization for fuzzy degraded character images”, IEEE
Trans. on Image Processing, vol. 5, no. 10, pp. 1481-1485, Oct. 1996.

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[4] Levi, G. and Montanari, U., “A gray-weighted skeleton”, Information and Control,
vol. 17, pp. 62-91, 1970.
[5] Wang, L. and Pavlidis, T., “Direct gray-scale extraction of features for character
recognition”, IEEE Trans. on Pattern Anal. And Machine Intell., vol. 15, no. 10, pp.
1053-1067, Oct. 1993.
[6] Samira S. Mersa1, Ahmed M. Darwish, “A New Parallel Thinning Algorithm For
Gray Scale Images”,