In this paper we propose a new scheme to extract skeleton of Ribbon-like shape with a novel wavelet function. It consists of two phases, namely: based on these perfect properties of new wavelet function, and symmetry analyses of maxima modaii of wavelet transform are given. Midpoints of all pairs of contour elements are connected to generate a skeleton of the Shape, which is defined as wavelet skeleton. Four basic criteria for modifying the artifacts of wavelet skeleton are presented. A corresponding algorithm is developed, and the experimental results are shown that this algorithm is capable of extracting exactly skeleton of Ribbon-like shape with different widths as well as different grey-levels.

Character skeleton plays a significant role in character recognition. The strokes of a character may consist of two regions, i.e., singular and regular regions. The intersections and junctions of the strokes belong to singular region, while the straight and smooth parts of the strokes are categorized to regular region. Therefore, a skeletonization method requires two different processes to treat the skeletons in theses two different regions. All traditional skeletonization algorithms are based on the symmetry analysis technique. The major problems of these methods are as follows. 1) The computation of the primary skeleton in the regular region is indirect, so that its implementation is sophisticated and costly. 2) The extracted skeleton cannot be exactly located on the central line of the stroke. 3) The captured skeleton in the singular region may be distorted by artifacts and branches. To overcome these problems, a novel scheme of extracting the skeleton of character based on wavelet transform is presented in this paper. This scheme consists of two main steps, namely: a) extraction of primary skeleton in the regular region and b) amendment processing of the primary skeletons and connection of them in the singular region. A direct technique is used in the first step, where a new wavelet-based symmetry analysis is developed for finding the central line of the stroke directly. A novel method called smooth interpolation is designed in the second step, where a smooth operation is applied to the primary skeleton, and, thereafter, the interpolation compensation technique is proposed to link the primary skeleton, so that the skeleton in the singular region can be produced. Experiments are conducted and positive results are achieved, which show that the proposed skeletonization scheme is applicable to not only binary image but also gray-level image, and the skeleton is robust against noise and affine transform.