Coarse-to-fine Skeletons from Grey-level Pyramids

Coarse-to-fine skeletons of digital patterns in binary images are computed on a grey-level pyramid. This is built in such a way that pattern shape and topology are preserved at all resolution levels, as faithfully as possible. A key problem is spurious holes, created at lower resolutions by region merging, that would originate spurious loops in coarse skeletons. This is solved by a novel technique exploiting the grey-level pyramid.