Pruning methods are an essential complement to thinning and skeletonizing algorithms because these procedures tend to leave parasitic components that need to be “cleaned up” by postprocessing.
A common approach in the automated recognition of hand-printed characters is to analyze the shape of the skeleton of each character. These skeletons often are characterized by “spurs” (parasitic components). Spurs are caused during erosion by non uniformities in the strokes composing the characters. A morphological technique for handling this problem, starting with the assumption that the length of a parasitic component does not exceed a specified number of pixels