AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHM FOR SMOOTHING, LINEARIZATION AND DETECTION OF STRUCTURAL FEATURE POINTS OF BINARY IMAGE CONTOURS

In this paper, an efficient algorithm is developed for smoothing, line arization and detection of structural feature points of binary image c ontours. Using this algorithm, we can remove noisy pixels along a cont our, decompose the contour into a set of straight lines, and detect st ructural feature points which correspond to convex and concave segment s along the contour. Our algorithm only involves operations on contour chain codes and does not require float point calculations, thus it ca n be efficiently implemented. We have tested our method with handwritt en character images. Copyright (C) 1996 Pattern Recognition Society.