Skeleton-Based Recognition of Shapes in Images via Longest Path Matching

We present a novel image recognition method based on the Blum medial axis that identifies shape information present in unsegmented input images. Inspired by prior work matching from a library using only the longest path in the medial axis, we extract medial axes from shapes with clean contours and seek to recognize these shapes within "no isy" images. Recognition consists of matching longest paths from the segmented images into complicated geometric graphs, which are computed via edge detection on the (unsegmented) input images to obtain Voronoi diagrams associated to the edges. We present two approaches: one based on map-matching techniques using the weak Frechet distance, and one based on a multiscale curve metric after reducing the Voronoi graphs to their minimum spanning trees. This paper serves as a proof of concept for this approach, using images from three shape databases with known segmentability (whale flukes, strawberries, and dancers). Our preliminary results on these images show promise, with both approaches correctly identifying two out of three shapes.