The ridge-seeking method for obtaining the skeleton of digital images

A method for obtaining the skeleton of a segmented gray-scale image is introduced. The gray-scale information is used to produce a connected and one-point wide skeleton positioned in the ridge areas. The input image is considered to be a set of connected nonzero elements as object areas and zero elements as background areas. The obtained skeleton does not depend on the boundary of the image. The gray value of each point in an image represents the degree of its membership. Using the gray value information, the method seeks the ridge areas to position the skeleton.