A Dense Medial Descriptor for Image Analysis

We present dense medial descriptors, a new technique which generalizes the well-known medial axes to encode and manipulate whole 2D grayvalue images, rather than binary shapes. To compute our descriptors, we first reduce an image to a set of threshold-sets in luminance space. Next, we compute a simplified representation of each threshold-set using a noise-resistant medial axis transform. Finally, we use these medial axis transforms to perform a range of operations on the input image, from perfect reconstruction to segmentation, simplification, and artistic effects. Our pipeline can robustly handle any 2D grayscale image, is easy to use, and allows an efficient CPU or GPU-based implementation. We demonstrate our dense medial descriptors with several image-processing applications.