BOUNDARY EXTRACTION OF DISCRETE OBJECTS

One of the aims in the field of computer vision is to acquire informat ion about the geometric and topological properties of objects in a thr ee-dimensional world. First, we measure the objects and then we conver t the measured data into geometric and topological properties of the o bjects. As an intermediate between the measured data and the geometric and topological properties, a representation of the objects for compu ters is desired. In this paper, we propose a representation of objects and their boundaries, which is based on combinatorial topology, and d evelop a method of extracting boundaries of objects from measured data . It is sufficient to extract boundaries, because they include informa tion about the shape of the objects; the internal structure of the obj ects is not necessary far information about the shape. In addition, we prove that boundaries are uniquely obtained using our algorithm. (C) 1998 Academic Press.