Skeletonide is a parallel implementaion of Zhang-Suen morphological thinning algorithm written in Halide-lang. It can be used for fast skeletonization of binary masks. Can also be run on the GPU.

When you build the project, it generates an ahead-of-time compiled static library from the Halide pipeline. It is then linked with the caller code to generate a single binary.

Note: The Halide pipeline represents a single pass of the Zhang-Suen method. The iterations have to be handled by the caller code - see spook.cpp for an example. The number of iterations is hardcoded right now. It should depend on the completion flags returned by the Halide pipeline.

See spook.cpp for an example. The example benchmarks the time taken to skeletonize a large image on the GPU. Pipeline code is in src/pipeline.cpp.

We get the best performance when it is run on a GPU. The tests are run on the scikit-image's horse mask, but tiled 10x10 to create a large (3280, 4000) shaped test image. The time is averaged over 100 runs.

The scheduling of the Halide pipeline can be further tweaked through trial-and-error to achieve better CPU times. The slow performance on the CPU is partly explained by the fact that the pipeline only represents a single pass of the thinning algorithm. There is significant time penalty in handling the iterations from the outside as illustrated in spook.cpp.
However, on the GPU, Skeletonide performs roughly 10x faster than the scikit-image's CPU implemetation without major modifications. Not a level playing field, obviously.

The output on the scikit-image's horse mask:

Mask:

Skeleton:

$ cmake -S . -B build
$ cmake --build build
# this will build the static library and its 
# header in `build/` and a single test binary 
# called `spook` in `skeletonide` - which can
# be run `./spook` to see it in action.

MIT License