A new deformable model based on the use of a particle system is introduced. By defining the local behavior of each particle, the system behaves as an active contour model showing a variable topology and regularization properties. The efficiency of the particle system is illustrated by two applications: the first one concerns the use of the system as a skeleton extractor based on the propagation of particles inside a treeshaped object. Using this method, it is possible to generate a cartography

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... f structures such as veins or channels. In a second illustration, the system avoids the problem of initialization of a piecewise cubic Bspline network used to straighten curved text lines.