Contour Extraction and Compression-Selected Topics

The subject of this chapter is to describe selected topics on contour extraction, approximation and compression in spatial domain. Contours are treated as important image structure required in many applications, for example in analysis of medical image, computer vision, robot guidance, pattern recognition etc. Contour compression plays important role in many practical tasks associated with contour and image processing. The main approach solving the problem of contour compression is based on polygonal approximation. In this chapter the traditional and new methods for contour approximation in spatial domain are presented. These methods are often much faster than the methods of compression based on transform coding. In order to extract the contours from the image some algorithms have been developed. The selected well known methods for contour extraction and edge detection as well as the new algorithms are also presented in this chapter. The author is grateful to his Ph.D. students A. Ukasha and B. Fituri for their contribution in preparation of this chapter.