A skeleton based decomposition of binary shapes

A binary pattern represented by its (d1, d2)-weighted skeleton is decomposed into primitives of given shape, which correspond to appropriate skeleton subsets. The primitives are defined in a context-dependent way and are suitable to cope with large variability the shape of a pattern may assume. The resulting decomposition is rotation invariant, and is natural with respect to both the number and the type of primitives forming the pattern. The computational cost of the process is modest, since all the computations are performed on sets of skeletal pixels.