EFFICIENT MORPHOLOGICAL SHAPE REPRESENTATION

Mathematical morphology is well suited to capturing geometric informat ion, Hence, morphology-based approaches have been popular for object s hape representation, The two primary morphology-based approaches-the m orphological skeleton and the morphological shape decomposition (MSD)- each represent an object as a collection of disjoint sets, A practical shape representation scheme, though, should give a representation tha t is computationally efficient to use, Unfortunately, little work has been done for the morphological skeleton and the MSD to address effici ency. We propose a flexible search-based shape! representation scheme that typically gives more efficient representations than the morpholog ical skeleton and MSD, Our method decomposes an object into a number o f simple components based on homothetics of a set of structuring eleme nts, To form the representation, the components are combined using set union and set difference operations, We use three constituent compone nt types and a thorough cost-based search strategy to find efficient r epresentations. We also consider allowing object representation error, which may yield even more efficient representations.