 |
Skeletonization
Skeletonization is produced by an erosion that iteratively removes pixels from the periphery of features with the restriction that no feature pixel can be removed if its neighboring feature pixels would then be separated from each other. The process continues until there are no further changes, and the result leaves pixels that mark the midlines of structures and capture the topological shape of objects. Counting the ends (pixels in the skeleton with a single neighbor) and nodes (pixels in the skeleton with more than two neighbors) provides shape information. Removing ends (pruning) cleans up tesselations of cells or grains, while removing nodes can separate the parts of complex mesh and fiber structures for measurement. This interactive tutorial illustrates the result of skeletonization.
The tutorial initializes with a randomly selected specimen appearing in the Specimen Image window. The Choose A Specimen pull-down menu provides a selection of images, in addition to the initial randomly chosen one. The Original button shows the original grayscale image, the Thresholded Binary button shows the result of thresholding this to produce a binary image, and the Skeleton button shows the result of applying skeletonization.
Contributing Authors
John C. Russ - Materials Science and Engineering Dept., North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27695.
Matthew Parry-Hill, and Michael W. Davidson - National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, 1800 East Paul Dirac Dr., The Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, 32310.
BACK TO INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS
BACK TO MICROSCOPY PRIMER HOME
Questions or comments? Send us an email.
© 1998-2009 by Michael W. Davidson, John Russ, Olympus America Inc., and The Florida State University. All Rights Reserved. No images, graphics, scripts, or applets may be reproduced or used in any manner without permission from the copyright holders. Use of this website means you agree to all of the Legal Terms and Conditions set forth by the owners.
This website is maintained by our
Graphics & Web Programming Team
in collaboration with Optical Microscopy at the
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
Last modification: Tuesday, Sep 11, 2018 at 02:31 PM
Access Count Since July 20, 2006: 6754
For more information on microscope manufacturers,
use the buttons below to navigate to their websites:
