Perez and Vidal have proposed an optimal algorithm for the polygonal approx
imation of digitized curves in 1994. The complexity of their algorithm is O
((PS)-S-2), where P is the number of points and S is the number of segments
. We address the same problem using the framework of heuristic search strat
egies to find the shortest path in a graph and show that the complexity of
our algorithm is close to O(P-2). (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights
reserved.