CURVE SEGMENTATION AND REPRESENTATION BY SUPERELLIPSES

A method of segmenting curves into series of superelliptical arcs is p resented. A superellipse is the 2-dimensional form of the superquadrat ic and can describe circles, ellipses, crosses, parallelograms and rou nded rectangles with the same number of parameters. The superellipses are fitted using Powell's technique to minimise an appropriate error m etric. A tree is used to represent a number of interpretations and the concept of significance used to choose the most perceptually correct description. Results show that perceptually good features are chosen t o represent the various shapes that occur in images.