Morphological reversible contour representation

In this paper, a novel morphological reversible contour representation of discrete binary images is proposed. A binary image is represented by a set of nonoverlapping multilevel contours and a residual image. In this proposed representation, the total number of pixels representing an image is far less than the total number of pixels obtained by the seed-based morphological contour-skeleton lossless representation. The proposed contour representation is simple, unique. and general without restrictions on the binary image to be represented. Moreover, it requires fewer number of operations to compute the proposed representation compared with other lossless morphological representation methods. The resulting multicontour image component is also robust to noise. An efficient differential chain contour coding scheme is employed to further compress the represented image. The proposed method yields very low bit rates compared to the existing morphological techniques. To exactly reconstruct an original image, an automatic filling procedure, which properly fills a proper multicontour image according to its topological structure without need of seed points, is proposed. The morphological unique contour representation and its lossless reconstruction techniques have been tested on images with varying size and complexity. Examples are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.