Segmentation-Free Skeletonization of Gray-Scale Images via PDE's

| A simple approach to compute the skeletons of gray-scale images using partial di erential equations is presented in this paper. The proposed scheme works directly on the gray-scale images, without the necessity of pre-segmentation (binarization), or the addition of shock capturing schemes. This is accomplished by deforming the given image according to a family of modi ed continuousscale erosion/dilation equations. With the scheme here proposed, the skeleton of multiple objects can be simultaneously computed. Examples on synthetic and real images are