Selection of relevant nodes from component-trees in linear time

Abstract

Component-trees associate to a discrete grey-level image a descriptive data structure induced by the inclusion relation between the binary components obtained at successive level-sets. This article presents a method to extract a subset of the component-tree of an image enabling to fit at best a given binary target selected beforehand in the image. A proof of the algorithmic efficiency of this method is proposed. Application examples related to the extraction of drop caps from ancient documents emphasise the usefulness of this technique in the context of assisted segmentation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.