Piecewise‐linear approximation of discontinuous contour images based on clustering procedure

Abstract

AbstractThis paper discusses the problem of the piecewise‐linear approximation of contour images. Almost all the piecewise‐linear approximation methods that have been proposed can be applied only for continuous contours. Methods that can work well for discontinuous contours, for instance, have not yet been found.In this paper, a new method is proposed based on clustering as a piecewise‐linear approximation method that can even be applied to discontinuous contour images. Specifically, the method uses hard clustering or fuzzy clustering, where the set of edge points in the image is partitioned into line segment groups and parameters of line segments are computed from the groups. Good results were obtained in the evaluation experiment to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.