Morphological image coding via bit-plane decomposition and a new skeleton representation
A new approach for image coding based on bit-plane decomposition and binary morphological operations is presented. The image is first processed by an errordiffusion technique in order to reduce the number of bitplanes without a significant quality degradation. The bitplanes of the resulting image are converted to Gray code and are represented by a modified morphological skeleton which uses an increasing size structuring element. Redundancy in this representation is reduced with an algorithm motivated by a Geometric Sampling Theorem which we present. These reduced modified morphological skeletons are coded with an entropy coding scheme which was particularly devised for efficient skeleton coding. A postprocessing operation, as well as the possibility of geometric progressive transmission, are also discused.
