title: Efficient morphological shape representation.
abstract: Mathematical morphology is well suited to capturing geometric information. Hence, morphology-based approaches have been popular for object shape representation. The two primary morphology-based approaches-the morphological skeleton and the morphological shape decomposition (MSD)-each represent an object as a collection of disjoint sets. A practical shape representation scheme, though, should give a representation that is computationally efficient to use. Unfortunately, little work has been done for the morphological skeleton and the MSD to address efficiency. We propose a flexible search-based shape representation scheme that typically gives more efficient representations than the morphological skeleton and MSD. Our method decomposes an object into a number of simple components based on homothetics of a set of structuring elements. To form the representation, the components are combined using set union and set difference operations. We use three constituent component types and a thorough cost-based search strategy to find efficient representations. We also consider allowing object representation error, which may yield even more efficient representations.
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Electr. Eng., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Reinhardt
authors.forename: W E
authors.initials: WE
authors.lastname: Higgins