Line Extraction Using Image Carving

A line extraction method based on image carving is presented in this paper. The gradient magnitude of a pixel is taken as the point-importance of the pixel. The length of the line where the pixel lies, is considered as the lineimportance of the pixel. Iteratively, those pixels, whose point-importance value is less than an updated pointimportance threshold and whose line-importance value is less than an updated line-importance threshold, are carved off. In other cases, the pixels are preserved. A broken line can be identified and repaired using the gradient image of the last iteration. This method can extract “important” lines, remove “unimportant” ones, and repair broken ones.