The Distance Transform and its Computation
It serves as an educational resource for researchers and practitioners in image processing, but is incremental as it reviews existing methods without introducing new ones.
This tutorial explains and compares various approaches for computing distance transforms in binary images, with a focus on distinguishing between arbitrary and exact Euclidean distance transformations.
Distance transformation is an image processing technique used for many different applications. Related to a binary image, the general idea is to determine the distance of all background points to the nearest object point (or vice versa). In this tutorial, different approaches are explained in detail and compared using examples. Corresponding source code is provided to facilitate own investigations. A particular objective of this tutorial is to clarify the difference between arbitrary distance transforms and exact Euclidean distance transformations.