A parallel thinning algorithm for contour extraction and medial axis transform

The thinning algorithm proposed in this paper, is an improved parallel thinning algorithm that aims in both, medial axis based thinning and contour extraction in a same process. In the process of thinning to obtain the medial axis of the character the points are deleted from outer boundary first and then proceeded inside till a single pixel wide skeleton is produced. In this process the outermost boundary line alone is preserved which is then produced as the contour of the image. So within one algorithm we get the two major categories of skeletonization, Medial axis Transform and contour extraction. Experiments are done on printed English characters and the results show that this algorithm is very effective.