Skeletonisation Approaches for Determining Paths in an Image: A Review

Skeletonisation is an effective way to provide an intact representation of an object’s shape. This approach has great applications in the fields of motion planning, object representation, tracking, information retrieval, topology representation, sensor distribution and location, facility location, forestry application, building constructions etc. Skeletons naturally provide a pixel to boundary mapping through which the path between points can be found in a terrain map. Many approaches for determining the skeleton of a terrain exist. In this paper, the different methods for Skeletonisation are discussed. Initially the various categorizations of Skeletonisation is discussed which is further followed by application of those algorithms for path determining. Quantitative measures for validating the skeleton are also discussed. Finally, the applications of Skeletonisation in various domains are elaborated.