Skeletal modeling of ice leads

A morphological, model-based method for the automatic identification of ice leads is presented. The morphological model is based on skeletons, a tool from mathematical morphology that provides a structural description of ice lead shape. The model provides a significant reduction in the space needed to store an image with virtually no loss of morphological information. To illustrate the use of skeletons, various lead statistics, such as length and area, are calculated from lead skeletons and used to assess the effect of image smoothing and thresholding.>