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 maximal homothetics of a structuring element contained in the shape. In this paper, we develop an algorithm tha t generalizes the skeleton transform by allowing many different rectangles of different sizes and aspect ratios to be used as shape components. The sh ape components in our representations still have simple and well-defined ma thematical characterizations. The representation is uniquely defined and th e algorithm still is simple and efficient to implement. Experiments show th at our representations use significantly less shape components than those p roduced by the skeleton transform. We also describe different ways to deriv e a new set of rectangular shape components with less overlapping from the original set of rectangles from our representation algorithm. (C) 2000 Patt ern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights rese rved.