A new gray-scale thinning algorithm using local min/max operations is proposed. In this method, erosion and dilation properties of local min/max operations are using for generating new rides and detecting ridges in gray scale image, and gray-scale skeletons are gradually obtained by accumulating the detected ridges. This method can be applicable to the unsegmented image in which object are not specified, and the obtained skeletons correspond to the ridges (high gray values) of an input image.