Region-Enclosing Contours from Edge Pixels
Bernd R. Schlei · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2002
In the fields of digital image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition, the application of edge detection algorithms is important for the extraction of multiple touching regions in images. However, the enclosure of the regions with discrete contours is not straightforward in general. A novel region-enclosing contour method is therefore proposed in this paper. Topics such as (dilated) contour enclosure of edge pixels in 2D binary images, geometric thinning (skeletonization) of shapes, gap closure in contour networks, and down-sampling of contour supporting point sets are discussed and new techniques are proposed for the first time. Most of the newly found techniques depend heavily on the application of a Delaunay tessellation. The resulting set of novel shape processing tools is applied here to an image taken from a metal surface in electron backscattered diffraction experiments in order to provide an accurate characterization of grain boundaries.