"Extracting thin-lines in gray level images by pixel removal and ordered propagation"

An algorithm for extracting skeletons from gray-level images is presented. Skeletons are obtained by removal operations successively applied to pixel with increasing gray level. For this purpose, an ordered propagation procedure is employed to select the candidate pixels. The algorithm has been designed to minimize pixel access by using a priority queue of pixels. This algorithrn ensures a good performance on sequential processors by considering a pixel only when it is retrieved from the priority queue.