NURBS skeleton: A new shape representation scheme using skeletonization and NURBS curves modeling

Abstract

The representation and description of shapes or regions that have been segmented out of an image are early steps in the operation of most Computer vision systems; they serve as a precursor to several possible higher level tasks such as object/character recognition. In this context, skeletons have good properties for data reduction and representation. In this paper we present a novel shape representation scheme, named "NURBS Skeleton", based on the thinning medial axis method, the pruning process and the Non Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) curves approximation for the modeling step. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.