GRAPHICAL OBJECTS

We introduce the concept of graphical objects, the abstraction paradig ms to study them, and their applications in computer graphics. Intuiti vely, graphical objects encompass all the entities manipulated in a gr aphics system. This notion makes it possible to unify similar research topics appearing in the literature separately. We study the problem o f object metamorphosis, which includes the problem of image metamorpho sis. Although we are not primarily concerned with implementation issue s in this paper, the concepts we introduce can be exploited for system design and development that use object-oriented programming.