Design of a Cellular Architecture for Fast Computation of the Skeleton

This paper presents a new algorithm to extract the skeleton and its Euclidean distance values from a binary image. The extracted skeleton reconstructs the objects in the image exactly. The algorithm runs in O(n) time for an image of size n × n. It involves simple local neighborhood operations for each pixel and hence it is quite amenable to VLSI implementation in a cellular architecture. Results of simulation of the algorithm in a sequential computer are presented. Results of implementation of a VLSI design in Xilinx FPGA are also presented and they confirm the speed and suitability of our method for real-time applications.