The multiscale medial properties of interfering image structures

The multiscale medial axis (MMA) is a robust shape representation in analysing objects in greylevel images. It is computed as ridges in the medialness scale-space of an image. In this paper the multiscale medial properties of overlapping objects are investigated, the result of which is novel to the community in that the existing studies only concentrated on isolated objects. To improve the distinguishability of these objects, a sliding window algorithm is proposed to detect locally optimal scale ridges in scale space. When used in the medialness scale-space of an image, this efficient method can extract a complete set of MMAs for interfering objects, in contrast with the globally optimal scale ridge definition which has been widely used. This is demonstrated in the applications in medical images.