
BINARY IMAGE SHRINKING, THINNING, SKELETONIZING AND THICKENING 395
Figure 13.3-7 shows an example of the skeletonization of a binary image. The
eroded pixels are mid gray. It should be observed that skeletonizing gives different
results than thinning for many objects. Prewitt (23, p.136) has coined the term exo-
skeleton for the skeleton of the background of an object in a scene. The exoskeleton
partitions each objects from neighboring object, as does the thinning of the back-
ground.
13.3.4. Binary Image Thickening
In Section 13.2.1, the fatten operator was introduced as a means of dilating objects
such that objects separated by a single pixel stroke ...