Morphological reduction of skeleton redundancy

In this work we study morphological methods to reduce the amount of redundant points in the Skeleton representation of images. The advantage of removing redundant points using morphological operations only, lies in the computational eeciency of these operations, when implemented on parallel machines. We present a generic approach to obtain redundancy-reduced Skeletons, which yields morphological closed formulae to obtain a Skeleton with less redundant points than the regular one. Although not yet able to completely remove the redundancy in the general case, the generic approach is shown to provide a redundancy-free representation, for a particular important case. We also derive, from the generic approach, a morphological formula to obtain the Essential Points of the Skeleton, which are points that cannot be removed from the Skeleton without aaecting the error-free characteristic of the representation.