Detecting object skeletons in natural images presents challenges due to varied object scales and complex backgrounds. The skeleton is a highly compressing shape representation, which can bring some essential advantages but cause difficulties in detection. This skeleton line occupies a small part of the image and is overly sensitive to spatial position. Inspired by these issues, we propose the ProMask, which is a novel skeleton detection model. The ProMask includes the probability mask representation and vector router. This skeleton probability mask describes the gradual formation process of skeleton points, which can achieve high detection performance and robustness. Moreover, the vector router module possesses two sets of orthogonal basis vectors in a two-dimensional space, which can dynamically adjust the predicted skeleton position. Experiments show that our approach realizes better performance, efficiency, and robustness than state-of-the-art methods. We consider that our proposed skeleton probability representation will serve as a standard configuration for future skeleton detection, since it is reasonable, simple, and very effective.
Keywords: Convolutional neural network; Probability representation; Robustness; Skeleton detection.
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