Flux invariants for shape

We consider the average outward flux through a Jordan curve of the gradient vector field of the Euclidean distance function to the boundary of a 2D shape. Using an alternate form of the divergence theorem, we show that in the limit as the area of the region enclosed by such a curve shrinks to zero, this measure has very different behaviors at medial points than at non-medial ones, providing a theoretical justification for its use in the Hamilton-Jacobi skeletonization algorithm of Siddiqi et al. (2002). We then specialize to the case of shrinking circular neighborhoods and show that the average outward flux measure also reveals the object angle at skeletal points. Hence, formulae for obtaining the boundary curves, their curvatures, and other geometric quantities of interest, can be written in terms of the average outward flux limit values at skeletal points. Thus this measure can be viewed as a Euclidean invariant for shape description: it can be used to both detect the skeleton from the Euclidean distance function, as well as to explicitly reconstruct the boundary from it. We illustrate our results with several numerical simulations.