The delta-medial axis: A robust and linear time algorithm for Euclidian skeleton computation

Medial axes are known to be very sensitive to shape irregularities. In this paper, we develop a solution to compute a stable medial axis of noisy discrete shapes. It introduces a parameter up to which a deformation (noise) of the shape is considered irrelevant, and thus ignored in the discrete Euclidian Medial Axis computation. We show the linearity property of the proposed algorithm and compare it with two recent state of the art methods: The Gamma Integer Medial Axis and the Discrete Linear Lambda Medial Axis using a single pruning parameter. Based on Kimia´s database (216 binary images), we present comparative experimental results with respect to skeletonization quality, noise sensitivity and computation time.