Nearly preprocessing-free method for skeletonization of gray-scale electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns via partial differential equations

We describe a novel method for skeletonization of gray-scale electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) fringe patterns. Our method is based on the gradient vector field (GVF). We propose a new partial differential equation model for calculating the GVF of ESPI fringe patterns. Further, we propose rules used to measure the possibility of each pixel on the skeleton based on the topological analysis of the GVF. The final skeletons are traced, which mimics the behavior of edge detection based on these rules. The proposed method works directly on the gray-scale images. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.