Thinning noisy binary patterns using human visual symmetry

From the hint of human visual symmetry, a thinning approach for noisy digital patterns is presented in this paper. It includes three main algorithms. Algorithm 1 is designed to find the effective circular range, for each pixel, containing the maximum effective information. Algorithm 2 is designed to compute the symmetry score of the pixel distribution in the circular range and convert the symmetry information into a gray-scale image, and Algorithm 3 provides a modified gray-scale thinning algorithm for thinning the gray-scale image to obtain a connected thin line. Experiments show that the thinning results obtained by the proposed method are properly acceptable as SNR⩾2.2 dB, and the connectedness of thin line can be preserved