A structural representation of shape and its features (Q1820589)

The paper presents a method for describing a shape the boundary of which is represented by a contour composed of primitives from a specified set. A word that describes the given contour constitutes the input to the detector (transducer); its output is a compact representation of the contour. This output is a sequence of descriptors, each consisting of two characters, and their meaning allows us to extract regions (features) and to characterize them exactly. These regions are arranged to form global features such as grooves and cascades. The global features are extracted by meas of very simple algorithms.