MULTISCALE CONTOUR SEGMENTATION AND APPROXIMATION - AN ALGORITHM-BASED ON THE GEOMETRY OF REGULAR INSCRIBED POLYGONS

This paper describes an algorithm to segment and approximate a contour into circular arcs and straight line segments. This algorithm finds a n adequate set of circular arcs and straight line segments to describe the contour shape. The resulting description respects a large number of shape representation criteria much better than any previous method. These criteria support efficient, general-purpose, unique, shape pres erving, local, robust, stable, invariant, multiscale, coherent, hierar chical, and multipart shape representations. The adequacy of the algor ithm is a direct consequence of the formal computational theory on whi ch it is based, The resulting description may depend on sensor accurac y, sampling step size, minimum and maximum contour curvatures, and sca le. The algorithm is thus parameterized using a small number of thresh olds related to these data set and task properties. Predictions regard ing the ground-truth performance of the algorithm can be made given so me knowledge of the above properties. Experimental comparative results are presented for contour data of varying complexity. (C) 1998 Academ ic Press.