Curvature of a one-pixel wide curve

Question

I have a numpy array depicting a one-pixel wide, discrete, connected curve. This curve is obtained by the Skeletonization operation of image processing. I am trying to find the curvature of the above curve at an arbitrary point, to detect bends/kinks (which will have high curvature value).

I tried to implement the above using the general formula for curvature. However, since this a pixelated, discrete curve, whose generating function is unknown, I tried to resort to using numpy gradient instead.

The problem I see with the above is that, since the curve is one-pixel wide, at any point the slope can be only one of 0, 1 or infinity. As a result, the curvature values that I get are mostly meaningless or useless.

I am looking for some suggestion on where to start in order to get a smooth curve out of the above, so that I can calculate curvature in a more meaningful way. Can somebody suggest any mathematical operation or convolution that I can apply to achieve the same? Below is a representative binary image that I have.

P.S. I am very, very new to image processing, so references to standard algorithms (in math books) or library implementations would be very helpful.

Answer 1

An established way to do this is to fit a low-order parametric curve to each of the skeletonized points using two or more neighbouring points. Then you compute curvature at the point using the fitted curve parameters with an analytic formula. Several curve models can be used. The two main models are:

1. A circle. The radius of curvature, R is the reciprocal of the curvature. For a curve, it equals the radius of the circular arc which best approximates the curve at that point. You can fit a circle to a set of 2D data points using various methods. A python library that has implemented several is here.
2. A quadratic. This can be fitted to the point and its neighbours, then curvature can be estimated through second-order differentiation of the curve here. You can use numpy.polyfit to fit this model. A simple strategy is to first estimate the tangent vector at the point, by fitting a local line (e.g. with polyfit using an order 1 curve). The you rotate the points to align the tangent vector with the x axis. Finally you fit a 1D quadratic f(x) to the rotated points using polyfit.

The tricky thing with making any curvature estimator is that curvature can be estimated at different scales. For example, do I want my estimator to be sensitive to high frequency detail or is this actually noise? This decision manifests in the choice of neighbourhood size. Too small, and errors from noise and discretization lead to unstable estimates. However too large, and there may be large modelling error (error by approximating the curve as a parametric function). Generally you have to select the best neighbourhood size yourself.

You're also going to have some poor curvature estimates at junction points, but that's largely unavoidable as curvature is not well defined there. A naïve fix could be to segment all paths at junction points, and then estimate curvature on each path individually.