Multistep polygonal approximation techniques

Abstract

Conventional polygonal approximation techniques have a fixed parameter that makes it difficult to extract the minimum number of critical points that represent faithfully complex contours having various details. We propose multistep polygonal approximation algorithms that integrate line segments detected at different scales or resolutions by means of scale or resolution partitioning of contour patterns. Via a computer simulation, we show that the proposed multistep methods approximate the contours better than conventional methods having a fixed parameter.