Efficient morphological shape representation with overlapping disk components

This paper proposes a new morphological shape representation algorithm, in which a two-dimensional (2-D) binary shape is represented as a union of cer tain disks contained in the given shape. The representative disks of differ ent sizes may overlap. But excessive overlapping between them is avoided. T he algorithm combines the advantages of the morphological skeleton transfor m (MST) and the morphological shape decomposition (MSD). The representative disks have simple and well-defined mathematical characterizations. The alg orithm is simple and efficient to implement. The experimental results show that the number of representative disks used by our algorithm is significan t lower than that used by the MSD. The overlapping level between the repres entative disks is much lower than that of the MST. A simple procedure can b e used to combine the representative disks into more meaningful shape compo nents. These shape components seem to correspond better to the natural shap e parts than those generated by the MSD. It is also possible to build a goo d approximation for a given shape using only a small number of major compon ents.