Determining local natural scales of curves

An alternative to representing curves at a single scale or a fixed number of multiple scales is to represent them only at Ž . their natural i.e. most significant scales. This allows all the important information concerning the different sized structures contained in the curve to be explicitly represented without the overhead of redundant representations of the curve. This paper describes several approaches to determining the local natural scales of curves. That is, various possibly overlapping sections of the curve should be represented at certain scales depending on their shape. The merits and drawbacks of the techniques are described, and the results of implementing one of them are shown. q 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.