Skeletal curves have an extensive history in digital image analysis. Shape simplification methods compute skeletal curves as a preprocessing step in software packages for digital image analysis. Recent impressive developments in hardware and image analysis software in general allow the exploitation of images at high grid resolutions. The literature offers a large diversity of algorithms that aim at deforming images into topologically equivalent images; the latter ones should represent the shape of complex objects in a simplified form. The book reviews those algorithms. It illustrates...