Breadth-first search and its application to image processing problems

This paper explores the use of breadth-first graph traversal for the proces sing of digital images, It presents efficient algorithms for eroding, dilat ing, skeletonizing, and distance-transforming regions, These algorithms wor k by traversing regions in a breadth-first manner, using a queue for storag e of unprocessed pixels. They use memory efficiently-pixels are removed fro m the queue as soon as their processing has been completed - and they proce ss only pixels in the region land their neighbors), rather than requiring a complete scan of the image. The image is still represented as a pixel matr ix in memory; the graph is just a convenient framework for thinking about t he algorithms.