Morphological representation of 2-D binary shapes using rectangular components

The morphological skeleton transform is a shape representation scheme that decomposes a shape into a union of all minimal homothetics of a structuring element contained in the shape. In this paper, we develop an algorithm that generalizes the skeleton transform by allowing many different rectangles of different sizes and shapes to be used as shape components. The shape components in our representations still have simple and well defined mathematical characterizations. The representation is uniquely defined and the algorithm is simple and efficient to implement. Experiments show that our representations use significantly less shape components than those produced by the regular skeleton transform.