How to separate paths from the output of EdgeDetect?

Question

I have been trying to find a way to separate the various closed paths that can be output by EdgeDetect. For example, taking the output of:

ColorNegate@EdgeDetect@Graphics[Style[Text["8"], 400]]

I'd like to be able to obtain a list like:

I'd really love to show some progress I made on this, but to be honest, I'm stuck at the beginning. I really don't know how to attack this one. The naïve approach might be to take one black pixel, then go around it registering adjacent pixels as part of the same path, while erasing them from the original image. But I don't expect this to be anything other than painfully slow, and there probably are some Mathematica image manipulation functions that I could leverage. So, how would you advise me to start?

Answer 1

You can use MorphologicalComponents to get the different loops:

With[{components = MorphologicalComponents@EdgeDetect@Graphics[Style[Text["8"], 400]]},
    ColorNegate@Image[1 - Unitize[components - #]] & /@ Range[Max[components]]]

Trying this on other similar characters — {"A", "B", "g", "9"}

Answer 2

This is partly derived from Vitaliy answer here.

pic = 
  Thinning@
   Binarize[
    GradientFilter[
     Rasterize[Style["8", FontFamily -> "Times"], ImageSize -> 500] //
       Image, 1]];
pdata = Position[ImageData[pic, DataReversed -> True]\[Transpose], 1];
lcp = ListCurvePathPlot[pdata, Axes -> None]

My only change is the massaging to get the '8' upright.

Now it's pretty easy to get the paths from it:

Graphics /@ Cases[lcp, Line[a_], Infinity]

Answer 3

While R.M. and belisarius answers certainly work, they seem a bit complex for me, extracting separate masks out of MorphologicalComponents's output. It gets a lot simpler if you use ComponentMeasurements instead, which simply returns a list of masks for each component (as sparse arrays, so might be more efficient, too):

edges = EdgeDetect@Graphics[Style[Text["8"], 400]]; (* taken from belisarius's answer *)
masks = ComponentMeasurements[edges, "Mask"];
Image /@ masks[[All, 2]]

Answer 4

In the same spirit as RM's answer

mc = MorphologicalComponents[EdgeDetect@Graphics[Style[Text["8"], 400]]];
Image /@ (Array[Replace[mc, {{Except[#] -> 0}}, {2}] &, Max@mc][[All, 1]])