Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Pattern Recognition
journal homepage: w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / p r

Polygonal approximation of digital planar curves through break point suppression

A. Carmona-Poyato ∗ , F.J. Madrid-Cuevas, R. Medina-Carnicer, R. Muñoz-Salinas
Department of Computing and Numerical Analysis, Córdoba University, 14071 Córdoba, Spain

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: This paper presents a new algorithm that detects a set of dominant points on the boundary of an eight-
Received 5 September 2008 connected shape to obtain a polygonal approximation of the shape itself. The set of dominant points is
Received in revised form 8 May 2009 obtained from the original break points of the initial boundary, where the integral square is zero. For
Accepted 10 June 2009
this goal, most of the original break points are deleted by suppressing those whose perpendicular dis-
Keywords: tance to an approximating straight line is lower than a variable threshold value. The proposed algorithm
Digital planar curves iteratively deletes redundant break points until the required approximation, which relies on a decrease
Polygonal approximation in the length of the contour and the highest error, is achieved. A comparative experiment with another
Dominant points commonly used algorithm showed that the proposed method produced efficient and effective polygonal
approximations for digital planar curves with features of several sizes.
© 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction • Grumbach et al. [18], for the representation of geographic infor-

Image processing techniques have been widely used in object
recognition, industrial dimensional inspection, monitoring tasks, and
many other diverse fields of science and engineering. Extracting
meaningful features from digital planar curves is an important target
in many machine vision applications [56].
Since Attneave's famous observation that information regarding
the shape of a curve is concentrated at dominant points [4], its de-
tection is an important research area for the contour methods of
shape analysis. Such points are important features in image match-
ing, shape description, and pattern recognition because they pro-
vide significant data reduction while preserving crucial information
about the object [23].
The advantages of using dominant points in computer vision are
clear: in an aerial image, dominant points indicate man-made ob-
jects; in a time sequence, dominant points can be used to compute
the displacement between each pair of consecutive images [23].
Shape representation by polygonal approximation has been
extensively used for constructing a characteristic description of a
boundary in the form of a series of straight lines. This represen-
tation is very popular due its simplicity, locality, generality, and
compactness [34].
Polygonal approximation is used in important applications to
recognise planar objects, for example in:
• Goyal et al. [17], for the recognition of numerals on car number
plates and aircraft.
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 957212189; fax: +34 957218630.
E-mail address: ma1capoa@uco.es (A. Carmona-Poyato).
mation.
• Semyonov [50], for electroculographic biosignal processing.
• Shape understanding [4].
• Image analysis by providing a set of feature points [37].
• Image matching algorithms [24,51,57].
Many efficient algorithms for the polygonal approximation of dig-
ital curves have been developed. The two main approaches to the
problem are [30]:
• Fitting the curve with a sequence of line segments that reduces a
certain error criterion or optimality constraint.
• Finding a subset of dominant points as vertices of the approxi-
mating polygon.
In the first approach, the goal is to capture the essence of the bound-
ary shape with the least number of straight-line segments. In this ap-
proach, some methods obtain optimal polygonal approximation with
regard to the number of segments and maximal error [38,40,47,48].
In most cases, the number and position of the detected vertices de-
pend on a user-selected threshold and differ with variation in the
size and orientation of the shape [30]. The second approach obtains
the vertices of the approximated polygon directly through detect-
ing the corner of digital boundaries (dominant points). Generally,
dominant points are points of high curvature. For this reason, these
methods can be classified into three categories:
• Those that search for dominant points by estimating directly the
curvature in the original picture space [44,45,11,1,52,2,41,42,58,8,
20,26].

0031-3203/$ - see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2009.06.010
 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25
• Those that evaluate the curvature by transforming the contour to
the Gaussian scale space [14,35,36,43].
• Those that search for dominant points using some significant mea-
sure other than curvature [5,9,13,25,19,53,29,55,56,30,7,3,31,15,
32,33].
Some of the direct curvature estimation methods use angle de-
tection algorithms and need a previous region of support to estimate
the curvature. Others algorithms require a user-defined threshold
to obtain the dominant points. Finally, other algorithms use non-
parametric procedures relying on the geometry of the contour to
obtain the support region dynamically for each boundary point [52].
In this paper, an algorithm for the polygonal approximation of
digital planar curves is presented. This algorithm relies on break
point suppression to detect dominant points and obtain an efficient
polygonal approximation. To estimate the break points (i.e., where
the integral square is zero), all collinear points are deleted using
the proposed algorithm. This algorithm iteratively obtains dominant
points by deleting quasi-collinear break points using a variable dis-
tance as a threshold value. The algorithm finishes when a required
approximation, which is reliant on the contour length decrease and
the highest error, is achieved.
In Sections 2 and 3, the comparison methods and proposed
method are described. The experimental results are shown in
Section 4, and the main conclusions are summarised in Section 5.
2. Dominant point detection
Since information on a curve is concentrated at the corners,
corner detection is an important research area in the contour
methods of shape analysis. Such points are commonly known as
dominant points. Dominants points are usually identified as points
with extreme local curvature. In the continuous case, the curvature
of a point is defined as the rate of change between the tangent angle
and the arc length:
d
=
ds
In the discrete space, many algorithms have been suggested to cal-
culate the curvature of a point using information from neighbouring
points. Those neighbouring points are designated as region of sup-
port for a given point.
Although dominant points can constitute an approximating poly-
gon, polygonal approximation is conceptually different from domi-
nant point detection [22]. Polygonal approximation seeks to find a
polygon that best fits the given digital curve, and such a polygon may
or may not be based on connecting the detected dominant points.
2.1. Related work
Teh and Chin [52] used the ratio of distance between Pi and the
chord Pi−k , Pi+k (di,k ) as well as the length of the chord (li,k ), to
determine the support region
di,k
rik =
li,k
This ratio can be considerated as a measure equivalent to curvature.
Ansari et al. [2] proposed a method that assigns, for each bound-
ary point, a support region to the point based on its local properties.
Each point is then smoothed by a Gaussian filter with a width pro-
portional to its support region. A significance measure for each point
is then computed. Dominant points are finally obtained through
non-maximal suppression.
15
Ray and Ray [41] proposed a k-cosine-based method to estimate
the support region. Rosenfeld and Johnston [44] defined k-cosine,
which can be considered a measurement equivalent to curvature.
Sarkar [49] used a method for determining dominant points that
is based purely on chain code manipulation; the coordinates of the
digitised points are not required to be known or found.
Zhu et al. [58] used a method, which is reliable and robust with
regard to noise, to obtain previous pseudodominant points. A critical
level is assigned to these points, based on a triangular area defined
by the two neighbouring pseudodominant points. Points with less
critical levels are deleted until the required level of approximation
is obtained.
Cornic [9] pointed out that both Teh and Chin's algorithm and
Ray and Ray's algorithm are not robust for noisy contours, due to
the fact that the local maximum curvature may be caused by noisy
variations on the curve. He proposed an adaptive algorithm that does
not rely on curvature to detect dominant points. The main idea is
to measure the significance of each point for describing the contour
and to evaluate its significance not by using the point itself, but also
through the other points on the curve. This author noticed that a
few points are themselves a limit of the support region of many
points; most of the time, those points are dominant. The measure of
the significance of a point Pi is given by a function of the number of
times it has been the limit of a support region.
Latecki et al. [27] proposed a method based on the suppression of
a vertex with a minimal relevance measure that uses discrete curve
evolution (DCE). The relevance measure was based on differences in
the length of neighbouring vertices and their turn angles.
Wu [55] proposed a simple measurement to detect corners. He
used an adaptive bending value to determine the region of support
for each point in the contour.
Marji and Siy [30] proposed a new algorithm that detects a set
of dominant points of a contour, which constitute the vertices of a
polygonal approximation of the contour itself. The algorithm first
calculates the independent left and right support region for each
point using a non-parametric, least-squares error criterion. The end
points of the support region are called nodes, and their strength is
(1)
measured by the frequency of their selection (similar to Cornic's
method). Only nodes with a strength greater than zero are consid-
ered. The nodes are sorted in descending order (strongest node first),
and the length of support region is used to sort the equal-strength
nodes (largest support region first). The approximating polygon is
obtained by connecting the estimated dominant points. However,
some of these points can be eliminated because (1) their contribu-
tion to the global contour is minimal and (2) they introduce non-
significant errors into the representation. For this purpose, Marji and
Syi [30] used an algorithm for the suppression of collinear points and
another algorithm for the suppression of adjacent dominant points.
Carmona et al. [7] proposed a new algorithm to search for dom-
inant points using a significant measure other than curvature. First,
the support region for each point was calculated. Left and right sup-
port regions for each point were independent. An adaptive bending
value to calculate the estimated curvature in a point Pi was used.
Once the dominant points are obtained, some of these points min-
imally affect the global contour (since the distance between these
dominant points to the line that joins the immediate left Pl and right
(2)
Pr dominant points is 0 or close to 0). A method to eliminate the
collinear points based on an optimisation procedure was proposed.
Gao et al. [15] proposed a new corner detection method for
boundaries that is based on a dyadic wavelet transform (WT) at local
natural scales. The points corresponding to wavelet transform mod-
ulus maxima (WTMM) at different scales are taken as corner candi-
dates. For each candidate, the scale at which the maximum value of
the normalised WTMM exists is defined as the “local natural scale”;
the corresponding modulus is taken as its significance measure. This
16 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25

approach achieves more accurate estimation of the natural scale of
each candidate than the existing global natural scale-based methods.
Masood [31,32] proposed a new method based on dominant point
deletion. An initial set of dominant points was used. All of the break
points were selected as an initial set, because they produce a devia-
tion of zero from the original contour; this was the basic requirement
of the algorithm. Masood obtained these break points using Free-
man's chain code. Deletion of any dominant point would increase
the sum of the squared error ISE (i.e., the distance of all curve points
from the polygonal approximation). The perpendicular squared dis-
tance of any point Pk (xk , yk ) from the straight line connecting the
point Pi (xi , yi ) and Pj (xj , yj ) is calculated as
 Eopt is the error incurred by the optimal algorithm. Both algorithms

 ((xk − xi )(yj − yi ) − (yk − yi )(xj − xi ))2
 (3)
(xi − xj )2 + (yi − yj )2
He used an algorithm where dominant points increasing the mini-
mum value of the ISE were deleted.
Masood [33] improved his method using a local optimisation
algorithm to reduce the error (ISE) after each deletion.
2.2. Efficiency of dominant points detectors
The focus of research in polygonal approximation is to obtain
a reasonable/required compression level with minimum er-
ror/distortion [33]. The efficiency of dominant point detectors or
the quality of polygonal approximation can be measured by the
amount of data reduction and the closeness to the original bound-
ary. These measures are the two most important used for assessing
the results of polygonal approximation algorithms. Many other
measures, based on these, have been used to evaluate and compare
the efficiency of dominant point detectors. These measures are
well the polygon obtained by the algorithm to be tested fits the curve
relative to the optimal polygon in terms of the approximation error.
Efficiency measures how compact the polygon obtained by the al-
gorithm to be tested is, relative to the optimal polygon that incurs
the same error. These components are defined as
Eopt
Fidelity = 100 (7)
Eapprox
Mopt
Efficiency = 100 (8)
Mapprox
where Eapprox is the error incurred by the algorithm to be tested and
are set to produce the same number of lines. Mapprox is the number
of lines in the approximating polygon produced by the algorithm to
be tested, and Mopt is the number of lines that the optimal algorithm
would require to produce the same error as the tested algorithm.
To obtain the optimal polygon in terms of the approximation error,
Perez and Vidal [38] proposed a method using dynamic program-
ming.
The advantage of Rosin's [46] evaluation criteria over Sarkar's [49]
method is that it can be used to compare the results of polygonal
approximation with different numbers of dominant points.
Depending on the shape of the curve, the two measures may vary
considerably. Rosin used a combined measure (geometric mean of
fidelity and efficiency)

Merit = Fidelity × Efficiency (9)
To avoid the same problem, Marji and Syi [30] used a modified
version of the FOM (in this case, he used the inverse of the FOM).
The new measure is defined as

ISE
• Compression ratio (CR) WEx2 = (10)
CRx
n
CR = (4) where x is used to control the contribution of the denominator to
nd the overall result in order to reduce the imbalance between the two
where n is the number of points in the contour and nd is the terms. These authors used x = 1, 2 and 3.
number of points of the polygonal approximation. A small number
of dominant points implies a large compression ratio. 3. Proposed method
• The sum of square error (ISE) is defined as
Our method first obtains all of the break points by suppression

n
ISE = e2i (5) of the collinear points. For this purpose, the algorithm proceeds as
i=1
follows:

where ei is the distance from Pi to the approximated line segment, • An initial break point Pini1 is selected. This point can be any break
obtained using Eq. (3). point of the original contour.
• Sarkar [49] combined these two measures as a ratio, producing a • A distance dt , near zero (e.g., 0.1) is set as a threshold value.
normalised figure of merit (FOM). This is defined as • The points whose distance (d) from the straight line that joins the
next point and previous point is lower than threshold value (dt )
CR
FOM = (6) are deleted, because they are collinear points. This elimination
ISE
process can be summarised as follows:
• The maximum error (E∞ ) is the maximum value of ei . The ISE can ◦ select initial point Pini1 as Pi , and the second and third point as
hide a large error at particular point due to closeness of the polyg- Pj and Pk ,
onal approximation to other parts of the curve. This is not desir- ◦ repeat,
able and may result in the hiding of important features of a given ◦ perpendicular distance d of Pj from the straight line connecting the
boundary. Therefore, the maximum error is also an important point Pi and Pk is calculated using Eq. (3),
error measurement. ◦ if d < = dt then
Pj is eliminated (Fig. 1)
Rosin [46] showed that the two terms in the FOM are not bal- Pj ← Pk and Pk ← Pk+1
anced, causing the measure to be biased toward approximations with ◦ else
lower ISE (which can be easily attained by increasing the number of Pi ← Pj , Pj ← Pk and Pk ← Pk+1
detected dominant points). Hence, it is not the best measure for com- ◦ end-if
paring contours with different numbers of dominant points. Rosin ◦ until Pj = Pini1
used two components: fidelity and efficiency. Fidelity measures how ◦ end-repeat.
 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25
Pj
d Pk
Pi
Fig. 1. Elimination of redundant break points (I).
Fig. 2. Elimination of redundant break points (II).
All of the collinear points are thus eliminated, and all of the break
points are obtained.
This idea is shown in Figs. 1 and 2. The first figure shows the
perpendicular distance, d, of the central point from the straight line
connecting the previous and the next point. In Fig. 2, 1.0 is used as
a threshold value to eliminate the first redundant break points. To
simplify the explanation, all of the points of the contour are used,
including the collinear points. In all cases except for case (h), the
central point is eliminated.
Using an initial point Pini for each iteration, an iterative proce-
dure similar to the method for the suppression of collinear points
described above is used. In this case, Pi , Pj and Pk are consecutive
break points.
• an initial distance dt is set as threshold value,
• repeat
17
Fig. 3. Dominant points of the chromosome contour: (a) rt = 0.7, n = 12, (b)
rt = 0.5, n = 12, (c) rt = 0.4, n = 12, and (d) rt = 0.3, n = 31.
◦ The redundant quasi-collinear break points with a distance (d)
lower than threshold value (dt ) are deleted, using the algorithm
used for the suppression of collinear points.
◦ dt is increased.
• until final condition is satisfied,
• end-repeat.
An initial value 0.5 is used for
√ the distance threshold, because the
possible minimum error is 1/ 5 = 0.447 once the collinear points
are removed. This case happens with three consecutive break points
(without intermediate collinear points) when the chain code of the
first and second differ in one. For this reason, it is possible to remove
the break points in the first iteration using an initial value of 0.5.
A 0.5 increment (low value) is used to avoid many points that sat-
isfy the final condition in the last iteration. If we use a high value as
an increment, many unnecessary points that satisfy the final condi-
tion can be obtained in the last iteration. In most cases, a maximum
of only three or four iterations are necessary; higher values do not
greatly reduce the efficiency of the method.
Horng [21] noted the significance of the initial point for achieving
the minimum error fitting. The initial point must be within the final
set of dominant points.
To obtain the initial point, any break point is used as initial point
in the first iteration (dt = 0.5); redundant break points in this itera-
tion are eliminated. After the first iteration, the initial point for the
next iteration is obtained. For this purpose, the break point with the
maximum distance to the straight line that joins the next and pre-
vious break points is selected. This initial point will remain and will
finally be a dominant point. In Figs. 3–6, the initial point is shown
as the most severely standing out point. These figures show that the
initial point remains in all iterations.
Obtaining the initial point after the first iteration allows us to
avoid the problem in which all points of the initial contour are break
points. The initial point obtained is less sensitive to noise.
Elimination of redundant break dominant points can be continued
in this way until the required level of approximation is obtained.
The termination condition can depend upon the requirements of the
end user. Masood [31] proposed a termination condition that relies
on the maximum error (E∞ ). He used 0.9 as a threshold value to
establish the final condition. We believe that this value cannot be
fixed, because it does not take into account the size, shape, and noise
of the original boundary. In any case, it would have to be a value
that varies depending on the size, shape, and noise of the original
contour.
18 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25
Fig. 4. Dominant points of the leaf contour: (a) rt = 0.7, n = 21, (b) rt = 0.5, n = 21,
(c) rt = 0.4, n = 21, and (d) rt = 0.3, n = 49.
Fig. 5. Dominant points of the infinity contour: (a) rt = 0.7, n = 10, (b) rt = 0.5, n = 10,
(c) rt = 0.4, n = 11, and (d) rt = 0.3, n = 27.
We propose a termination condition based on the decrease in
length associated with a deleted break point (Pi ), li,j , and the max-
imum error, E∞,j , obtained in the j-th iteration. The length evolu-
tion and the maximum error show the deformation of the boundary
when break points are eliminated. Therefore, we use the ratio ri . This
is defined as
li,j
ri = (11)
E∞,j
In the first iteration, a great number of noisy break points are sup-
pressed, the maximum error is small, and the length of the boundary
is significantly reduced; however, the decrease in length associated
with a point as well as the ri values are small.
There is a special and trivial case in which all points of the contour
are break points (zigzag contour). In this case, a high value of ri
(close to 0.9) is obtained for the second and next break points. If a
break point satisfies the final condition, we avoid this drawback by
checking to see if the break point is a zigzag point (i.e., if the next and
previous points are break points too). In this case, the second point
in the zigzag is removed. Therefore, the next points in the zigzag do
not satisfy the final condition, because the ri value of the next break
point is reduced. The next break point in the zigzag is suppressed
Fig. 6. Dominant points of the semicircle contour: (a) rt = 0.7, n = 6, (b) rt = 0.5, n = 7,
(c) rt = 0.4, n = 21, and (d) rt = 0.3, n = 44.
Fig. 7. Trivial cases: (a) rectangle 1, (b) rectangle 2, (c) final contour in rectangle 1,
and (d) final contour in rectangle 2.
in the elimination process using the threshold distance. This case is
shown in Fig. 7.
In the early iterations, a high number of redundant break points
are eliminated when the threshold is increased. The maximum error
is thus considerably greater than the decrease in length associated
with a point, and the ri values are small. The obtained boundary is
consequently very similar to the original boundary, but the number
of dominant points can be high depending on the shape of the orig-
inal boundary.
In the next iterations, the number of redundant points eliminated
decreases. If important break points are deleted, the ri values are
much higher than the previous values of ri and the obtained bound-
ary is very different from the original boundary.
The termination condition is satisfied when any ri value exceeds
a threshold value, rt , that is experimentally determined. In the last
iteration, all selected break points are suppressed, except for those
that meet the condition.
A threshold value, rt , between 0.5 and 0.7 was experimentally
obtained. If a value close to 0.7 was used, a boundary with few dom-
inant points and a high error maximum was obtained. In this case,
the polygonal approximations were not very good, but the original
contour was recognisable in the obtained approximations. If a value
 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25
Fig. 8. Polygonal approximations for other real contours (rt = 0.5).
lower than 0.5 was used, a boundary with many dominant points
and a small maximum error was obtained. If a value equal to 0.5
was used, a good polygonal approximation with a reduced number
of dominant points and greater maximum error was obtained.
4. Experimental results
The proposed method was applied to four contours, the chro-
mosome, infinity, leaf, and semicircles curves, that have been
commonly used as planar curves in many previous and recent
studies [32,33,31,15,7,30,55,56]. An initial value of 0.5 for distance
the threshold with a 0.5 increment was used. The resultant contours,
using values 0.7, 0.5, 0.4, and 0.3, are shown in Figs. 3–6.
For the shapes of chromosome and leaf, the results of the pro-
posed algorithm were similar when rt took values of 0.7, 0.5, and
0.4. For the shapes of infinity and semicircle, the results of proposed
algorithm were similar when rt took values 0.7, and 0.5.
For the chromosome, leaf, and infinity shapes, the obtained
boundary was very similar to the original boundary when rt was
between 0.5 and 0.7. For the semicircular shape, however, the
obtained boundary differed from the original boundary.
All of the obtained boundaries were very similar to the original
boundary, and the number of dominant points was small when a
value of 0.4 was used for rt .
When a value of 0.3 was used for rt , however, the number of
dominant points was very high.
The proposed method was applied to other real boundaries, us-
ing 0.5 and 0.7 as rt values. The polygonal approximations obtained
are shown in Figs. 8 and 9. The contours shown in Figs. 8 and 9 were
made from the segmentation of two real shapes by scanning the
real images (using an Epson Perfection Photo V100 scanner sets to
300 dpi resolution) and using manual segmentation. Then, we used
the classic algorithm [16] to obtain the chain code from the seg-
mented silhouette.
Table 1 shows a summary of the results of Figs. 8 and 9.
19
If rt was equal to 0.7, the figures show that a boundary with
few dominant points and a high maximum error was obtained; the
obtained contour was very similar to the original contour in almost
all cases. Moreover, if a value equal to 0.5 was used, a boundary with
many dominant points and a small error maximum was obtained;
the obtained contour was very similar to the original contour in
almost all cases.
The value of rt can be selected based on the requirements of the
end user. To obtain more precise contours, a value of 0.5 can be used.
To obtain contours that are less precise with few dominant points,
a value of 0.7 can be used.
Since the proposed method can obtain polygonal approximations
with different numbers of dominant points, the results of interme-
diate iterations were used to obtain dominant point numbers equal
to those obtained by the algorithms under comparison. Comparative
results for the popular boundaries of the chromosome, leaf, infinity,
and semicircles curves are listed in Tables 2 and 3.
For the shape of chromosome, the results of the proposed algo-
rithm are listed (in Table 2) with 18, 16, 15, and 12 dominant points
for comparison with other algorithms. This table shows that the
maximum error (E∞ ) of the proposed method was less than or equal
to that from all of the other algorithms except for that of Masood
[32,33] for cases of 12 dominant points. The best results were ob-
tained by the Masood algorithm [33] and then our proposed method,
which was better than the rest of algorithms with regard to both the
ISE and FOM.
For the shape of leaf, the results of the proposed algorithm are
listed (in Table 2), with 28, 23, and 22 dominant points. This ta-
ble shows that the maximum error (E∞ ) of the proposed method
was less than or equal to that from all of the other algorithms
except for that of Masood [33] for cases of 28 dominant points.
The Masood algorithm [32] performed similarly, and another Ma-
sood algorithm [33] performed the best. The proposed method
was better than the rest of algorithms with regard to the ISE
and FOM.
20 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25

Fig. 9. Polygonal approximations for other real contours (rt = 0.7).

Table 1
Summary of the results for other real contours.

Contour N rt = 0.5 rt = 0.7

ndp CR ndp CR

Tinopeners 580 25 23.2 20 29

Plane1 1015 20 50.8 17 59.7
Plane2 787 10 78.7 7 112.4
Plane3 1073 24 44.7 11 97.5
Plane4 1126 19 59.3 17 66.2
Plane5 1098 28 39.2 7 156.9
Rabbit 745 28 26.6 10 74.5
Screwdriver 1677 8 209.6 4 419.2
Dinosaur1 795 38 20.9 23 34.6
Dinosaur2 625 29 21.6 19 32.9
Dinosaur3 674 29 23.2 26 25.9
Hand 1045 20 52.3 15 69.7
Hammer 2701 10 270.1 10 270.1
Fish-sword 2743 33 83.2 31 88.5
Turtle 553 29 19.1 23 24.0

For the semicircular shape, the results of the proposed algorithm
are listed (in Table 3) with 30 and 26 dominant points for compari-
son with other algorithms. This table shows that the maximum er-
ror (E∞ ) of proposed method was less than or equal to that from
all of the other algorithms except for that of Masood [33] for cases
of 26 dominant points. The Masood algorithm [32] performed sim-
ilarly, and another Masood algorithm [33] performed the best. The
proposed method was better than the rest of algorithms with regard
to the ISE and FOM.
Finally, for the infinity shape, the results of the proposed algo-
rithm are listed (in Table 3), with 13 and 10 dominant points. The
maximum error (E∞ ) of the proposed method was less than that for
all of the other algorithms. The proposed method was better than
the rest of the algorithms with regard to the ISE and FOM.
Rosin [46] compared 31 algorithms using the semicircular shape
presented by Teh and Chin [52]. He computed the algorithm's fidelity,
efficiency, and merit based on the optimal solution by Perez and
Vidal [38]. Table 4 shows the fidelity, efficiency, and merit for the
semicircle shape using the proposed method and other top-rated
existing methods for different polygonal approximations.
The proposed algorithm produced very good results, similar to
those from the best algorithms.
Table 5 shows the complete results when our method and Ma-
sood's [31] were applied to real contours. The latter was selected
since (1) its computational complexity is similar to ours, (2) it is very
recent, and (3) it has obtained good results. In Table 5 the parameter
FOM2 is defined as
CR2
FOM2 = (12)
ISE
and is included.
 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25 21

Table 2
Comparison with other methods.

Contour Method ndp CR E∞ ISE FOM

Chromosome Ray–Ray [41] 18 3.33 0.71 5.57 0.60

Ray–Ray [42] 0.65 4.81 0.69
Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.71 3.44 0.97
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 1.99 27.06 0.12
Masood [32] 0.52 2.88 1.16
Masood [33] 0.51 2.83 1.18
Proposed 0.51 3.01 1.11

Ansari and Huang [2] 16 3.75 2.00 20.25 0.19

Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.71 4.68 0.80
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 1.98 32.02 0.12
Wu [56] 0.69 4.70 0.61
Masood [32] 0.52 3.84 0.98
Masood [33] 0.63 3.49 1.07
Proposed 0.51 3.97 0.95

Teh and Chin [52] 15 4.00 0.74 7.20 0.56

Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.74 5.56 0.72
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 1.98 38.58 0.10
Masood [32] 0.63 4.14 0.97
Masood [33] 0.76 3.88 1.03
Proposed 0.63 4.27 0.94

Marji and Siy [30] 12 5.00 0.90 8.03 0.62

Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.89 8.92 0.56
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 2.16 45.61 0.11
Masood [32] 0.88 7.76 0.65
Masood [33] 0.79 5.82 0.86
Proposed 0.89 7.92 0.63

Leaf Cronin [10] 28 4.29 0.74 7.30 0.59

Latecki and Lakamper [27] 2.83 54.05 0.08
Masood [32] 0.66 6.91 0.62
Masood [33] 0.92 6.19 0.69
Proposed 0.74 6.83 0.63

Sarkar [49] 23 5.22 0.78 13.17 0.40

Wu [56] 1.00 20.34 0.26
Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.89 11.56 0.44
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 2.83 60.40 0.09
Carmona et al. [7] * 15.63 0.33
Masood [32] 0.74 10.61 0.49
Masood [33] 0.92 9.46 0.55
Proposed 0.74 10.68 0.49

Marji and Siy [30] 22 5.45 0.78 13.21 0.41

Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.89 13.71 0.39
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 2.83 60.55 0.09
Masood [32] 0.74 11.16 0.49
Masood [33] 0.95 10.66 0.51
Proposed 0.74 11.16 0.49

Rosin [46] showed that the two terms in the FOM are not bal-
anced, causing the measure to be biased toward approximations
with lower ISEs. This drawback becomes more evident for real con-
tours, which usually contains a large number of points. Therefore,
Marji and Syi [30] proposed a measurement similar to the FOM2,
namely 1/FOM2 (see Section 2.2), to compare the efficiency of differ-
ent methods. Additionally, Carmona et al. [7] proved that the FOM2
demonstrates better performance than the FOM.
The results shown in Table 5 can be summarised as follows:
• The Emax values obtained from the proposed method were greater
than those obtained by Masood's method, because the latter used
0.9 as a threshold but did not take into account the scale.
• The FOM values obtained from the proposed method, which takes
into account the ISE and CR, were lower than those obtained from
Masood's method. The reason for this is that the FOM was very bi-
ased because of the low ISE values in Massod's method. Therefore,
Masood's method obtained approximations with a large number
of dominant points.
• The FOM2 values obtained with our method for rt = 0.5 were
slightly better than those obtained with Masood's. However,
our method obtained polygonal approximations that required
90% fewer dominant points (on average). The FOM2 val-
ues obtained with our method for rt = 0.7 were worse than
those obtained with Masood's method in most cases. For this
value of rt , we would like to point out that our method ap-
proximated the polygon using the minimum possible num-
ber of dominant points while preserving the original shape.
Thus, the errors obtained for these approximations were very
high.
In conclusion, our results for the best approximation (rt = 0.5),
taking into account the best measurement of comparison (FOM2),
were slightly better than those obtained with Massod's method. Nev-
ertheless, we obtain polygonal approximations requiring 90% fewer
dominant points.
Finally, the proposed method was compared with Masood's meth-
ods, taking into account the time complexity and ISE, using real
22 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25

Table 3
Comparison with other methods (continued).

Contour Method ndp CR E∞ ISE FOM

Semicircles Cornic [9] 30 3.40 * 9.19 0.37

Cronin [10] 0.49 2.91 1.17
Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.63 4.30 0.79
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 1.00 4.54 0.75
Masood [32] 0.49 2.91 1.17
Masood [33] 0.49 2.64 1.29
Proposed 0.49 2.91 1.17

Wu [56] 26 3.92 0.88 9.04 0.43

Marji and Siy [30] 0.74 9.01 0.44
Zhu and Chirlian [58] 0.63 4.91 0.80
Latecki and Lakamper [27] 1.21 13.04 0.30
Masood [32] 0.63 4.91 0.80
Masood [33] 0.49 4.05 0.97
Proposed 0.63 4.91 0.80

Infinity Teh-Chin [52] 13 3.46 * 5.93 0.58

Wu [56] 1.11 5.78 0.60
Proposed 0.63 2.65 1.30

Cornic [9] 10 4.50 * 4.30 1.05

Carmona et al. [7] * 5.56 0.81
Proposed 0.90 5.29 0.90

Table 4
ISE, fidelity, efficiency and merit when proposed method and other methods are applied to Teh and Chin curve.

Method ndp ISE Fidelity Efficiency Merit

Massood [33] Any Optimum 100.0 100.0 100.0

Lowe [28] 13 21.66 95.7 98.6 97.1
Banerjee et al. [6] 6 150.53 93.3 98.7 96.0
Proposed method 30 2.91 90.7 97.4 94.0
Proposed method 24 6.18 89.2 96.3 92.7
Proposed method 26 4.91 82.5 95.4 88.7
Proposed method 21 9.82 81.7 95.8 88.5
Massood [32] 21 9.82 81.7 95.8 88.5
Proposed method 34 2.30 83.9 93.1 88.4
Sarkar [49] 20 13.65 66.0 78.9 72.2
Gao et al. [15] 13 * 40.1 54.1 73.4
Proposed method 11 48.25 67.7 88.0 77.2
Proposed method 10 65.29 60.8 90.5 74.2

Table 5
Proposed method and Masood's method.

Contour N rt = 0.5 rt = 0.7 Masood [31]

ndp Emax CR ISE FOM FOM2 ndp Emax CR ISE FOM FOM2 ndp Emax CR ISE FOM FOM2

Tin-openers 580 25 3.4 23.2 620.1 0.037 0.868 20 5.0 29.0 1857.5 0.016 0.453 119 1.0 4.9 22.2 0.220 1.072
Plane1 1015 20 6.3 50.8 6401.5 0.008 0.402 17 6.4 59.7 6773.8 0.009 0.526 258 1.0 3.9 47.0 0.084 0.330
Plane2 787 10 11.6 78.7 5655.4 0.014 1.095 7 21.0 112.4 62520.6 0.002 0.202 203 1.0 3.9 37.7 0.103 0.399
Plane3 1073 24 7.1 44.7 4508.7 0.010 0.443 11 26.5 97.5 135999.7 0.001 0.070 296 1.0 3.6 49.9 0.073 0.263
Plane4 1126 19 11.0 59.3 14966.3 0.004 0.235 17 11.0 66.2 14966.3 0.004 0.293 255 1.0 4.4 39.6 0.112 0.493
Plane5 1098 28 5.4 39.2 4103.3 0.010 0.375 7 32.2 156.9 147552.9 0.001 0.167 265 1.0 4.1 57.2 0.072 0.300
Rabbit 745 28 3.6 26.6 1094.5 0.024 0.647 10 13.3 74.5 18252.5 0.004 0.304 102 1.0 7.3 56.7 0.129 0.941
Screwdriver 1677 8 9.3 209.6 25570.9 0.008 1.718 4 30.6 419.3 415271.4 0.001 0.423 702 1.0 2.4 141.5 0.017 0.040
Dinosaur1 795 38 1.7 20.9 287.3 0.073 1.523 23 5.9 34.6 3800.8 0.009 0.314 155 1.0 5.1 27.0 0.190 0.975
Dinosaur2 955 38 4.4 25.1 2170.6 0.012 0.291 38 4.4 25.1 2170.6 0.012 0.291 194 1.0 4.9 40.3 0.122 0.601
Dinosaur3 674 29 3.4 23.2 975.6 0.024 0.554 26 4.6 25.9 1314.9 0.020 0.511 141 1.0 4.8 39.4 0.121 0.580
Hand 1041 20 6.3 52.1 5804.1 0.009 0.467 15 16.6 69.4 20707.2 0.003 0.233 175 1.0 5.9 56.8 0.105 0.623
Hammer 2701 10 13.2 270.1 17346.5 0.016 4.206 10 13.2 270.1 17346.5 0.016 4.206 635 1.0 4.3 176.9 0.024 0.102
Fish-sword 1912 46 13.6 41.6 18123.8 0.002 0.095 22 13.6 86.9 47090.3 0.002 0.160 989 1.0 1.9 121.1 0.016 0.031
Turtle 553 29 2.5 19.1 235.2 0.081 1.546 23 3.9 24.0 707.3 0.034 0.817 59 0.9 9.4 53.9 0.174 1.631

Averages 24.8 6.9 65.6 7190.9 0.022 0.964 16.7 13.9 103.4 59755.5 0.009 0.598 303.2 1.0 4.7 64.5 0.104 0.559

Results for other real contours.

contours. The comparison was run on a standard PC with Intel(R) break points in the first iteration until only three dominant points
Pentium(R) four CPUs with 3.00 GHz, 1 Gb of RAM using Ubuntu(R) were obtained. Fig. 10 shows the results using tinopeners, plane2,
8.1. For this purpose, the methods were applied using all of the initial rabbit, and dinosaur1 as real contours.
 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25 23

10000 1e+06
Masood Masood
Masood opt 100000 Masood opt
1000 Proposed Proposed
10000
100 1000

10 100
10
1
1
0.1 0.1
0 50 100 150 200 250 0 50 100 150 200 250

10000 1e+07
Masood 1e+06 Masood
Masood opt Masood opt
1000 Proposed Proposed
100000
100 10000
1000
10 100
10
1
1
0.1 0.1
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400

10000 1e+07
Masood Masood
Masood opt 1e+06 Masood opt
1000 Proposed Proposed
100000
100 10000
1000
10 100
10
1
1
0.1 0.1
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

10000 1e+07
1e+06
1000
100000
100 10000
1000
10 100
10
1
1
0.1 0.1
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Fig. 10. Graphs showing the time complexity and ISE using tinopeners, plane2, rabbit, and dinosaur1 as real contours. The left column shows time values in milliseconds,
and the right column shows the ISE. A logarithmic scale has been used on the y-axis.

In the case of the time complexity, our method produced the best
results since Masood's method eliminated only one break point in
each iteration. However, our method eliminated a high number of
break points in the first iteration. The worst case complexity of the
proposed algorithm can be given as O(mn), where n is the number
of points of the contour, and m is the number of initial break points.
The worst case occurs when only one break point is eliminated in
each iteration. This complexity is similar to that of Masood's method
[31,32]. Moreover, the worst case complexity of the optimised Ma-
sood method [33] can be given as O(mn2 ). For this reason, the time
complexity results of the proposed method were much better than
those of the optimised Masood method.
In the case of the ISE, the optimised Masood method obtained
the best results. Our method obtained better results than the
non-optimised Masood method when the number of dominant
points obtained was low, and the results were worse when the
number of dominant points obtained was high. In our opinion, this
is an advantage of our method: in this range of low values, a rea-
sonably high compression level with minimum error and distortion
required was obtained using our method (Fig. 8).
5. Conclusions
An efficient and simple approach to polygonal approximation is
presented in this paper. Initially, our method calculates all of the
break points at which the boundary makes a turn. Redundant break
points are deleted when they are quasi-collinear points with the
previous and next break points. For this purpose, a threshold distance
24 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25
is used. This threshold is increased until a termination condition is
satisfied.
We propose a termination condition based on the ratio li,j /E∞,j .
The threshold value of this ratio can be selected depending upon the
requirements of the end user. To obtain more precise contours with
more dominant points, a threshold value of 0.5 was experimentally
obtained. To obtain less precise contours with few dominant points,
a threshold value of 0.7 was experimentally obtained.
The algorithm produced efficient polygonal approximations with
different numbers of dominant points. The proposed method was
compared to recent and commonly used algorithms. The results were
similar to those from the Masood algorithm [31,32] and better than
those from other algorithms under comparison. The results were only
worse than the optimised Masood algorithm [33], but this algorithm
has greater computational complexity than the proposed algorithm
since it uses an optimisation algorithm.
References
[1] I.M. Anderson, J.C. Bezdek, Curvature and tangential deflection of discrete arcs:
a theory based on commutator of scatter matrix pairs and its application to
vertex detection in planar shape data, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis
and Machine Intelligence 6 (1984) 27–40.
[2] N. Ansari, K.W. Huang, Non-parametric dominant points detection, Pattern
Recognition 24 (1991) 849–862.
[3] F. Arrebola, F. Sandoval, Corner detection and curve segmentation by
multiresolution chain code linking, Pattern Recognition 38 (2005) 1596–1614.
[4] F. Attneave, Some informational aspects of visual perception, Psychological
Review 61 (1954) 189–193.
[5] A. Bandera, C. Urdiales, F. Arrebola, F. Sandoval, 2D object recognition based on
curvature functions obtained from local histograms of the contour chaincode,
Pattern Recognition Letters 20 (1999) 49–55.
[6] S. Banerjee, W. Niblack, M. Flickner, A minimum description length polygonal
approximation method, Technical Report no. RJ 10007, IBM Research Division,
1996.
[7] A. Carmona-Poyato, N.L. Fernandez-Garcia, R. Medina-Carnicer, F.J. Madrid-
Cuevas, Dominant point detection: a new proposal, Image and Vision Computing
23 (2005) 1226–1236.
[8] D. Chetverikov, Z. Szabo, A simple and efficient algorithm for detection of high
curvature points in planar curves, in: Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop of
Austrian Pattern Recognition Group, 1999, pp. 175–184.
[9] P. Cornic, Another look at dominant point detection of digital curves, Pattern
Recognition Letters 18 (1997) 13–25.
[10] T.M. Cronin, A boundary concavity code to support dominant points detection,
Pattern Recognition Letters 20 (1999) 617–634.
[11] H. Freeman, L.S. Davis, A corner finding algorithm for chain-coded curves, IEEE
Transactions on Computers 26 (1977) 297–303.
[13] A.M.N. Fu, H. Yan, A contour bent function based method to characterize
contour shapes, Pattern Recognition 30 (1997) 1661–1671.
[14] A. Garrido, N. Perez, M. Garcia-Silvente, Boundary simplification using a
multiscale dominant-point detection algorithm, Pattern Recognition 31 (1998)
791–804.
[15] X. Gao, F. Sattar, A. Quddus, R. Venkateswarlu, Multiscale contour corner
detection based on local natural scale and wavelet transform, Image and Vision
Computing 25 (2007) 890–898.
[16] R.C. Gonzalez, R.E. Woods, Tratamiento Digital de Imagines, Addison-Wesley,
Reading, MA, 1996.
[17] S. Goyal, M.P. Kumar, C.V. Jawahar, P.J. Narayanam, Polygon approximation of
closed curves across multiple views, in: Indian Conference on Vision, Graphics
and Image Processing, 2002.
[18] S. Grumbach, P. Rigaux, L. Segoufin, The DEDALE system for complex spatial
queries, in: Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD Symposium on the Management of
Data, 1998, pp. 213–224.
[19] Y.H. Gu, T. Tjahjadi, Coarse-to-fine planar object identification using invariant
curve features and B-spline modeling, Pattern Recognition 33 (2000)
1411–1422.
[20] J.H. Han, T. Poston, Chord-to-point distance accumulation and planar curvature:
a new approach to discrete curvature, Pattern Recognition Letters 22 (2001)
1133–1144.
[21] J.H. Horng, J.T. Li, An automatic and efficient dynamic programming algorithm
for polygonal approximation of digital curves, Pattern Recognition Letters 23
(2002) 171–182.
[22] J.H. Horng, Improving fitting quality of polygonal approximation by using
dynamic programming technique, Pattern Recognition Letters 23 (2002)
1657–1673.
About the Author—A. CARMONA-POYATO received his title of Agronomic Engineering and Ph.D. degree from the University of Cordoba (Spain), in 1986 and 1989, respectively.
Since 1990 he has been working with the Department of Computing and Numerical Analysis of the University of Cordoba as lecturer. His research is focused on image
processing and 2-D object recognition.
[23] S. Hsin-Teng, H. Wu-Chih, A rotationally invariant two-phase scheme for corner
detection, Pattern Recognition 29 (1996) 819–828.
[24] X. Hu, N. Ahuja, Matching point features with ordered geometric, rigidity,
and disparity constraints, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence 16 (1994) 1041–1049.
[25] P.W. Huang, S.K. Dai, P.L. Lin, Planar shape recognition by directional flow-
change method, Pattern Recognition Letters 20 (1999) 163–170.
[26] K.-L. Chung, P.-H. Liao, J.-M. Chang, Novel efficient two-pass algorithm for
closed polygonal approximation based on LISE and curvature constraint criteria,
Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation 19 (2008) 219–230.
[27] L.J. Latecki, R. Lakamper, Convexity rule for shape decomposition based on
discrete contour evolution, Computer Vision and Image Understanding 73
(1999) 441–454.
[28] D.G. Lowe, Three-dimensional object recognition from single two dimensional
images, Artificial Intelligence 31 (1987) 355–395.
[29] M. Marji, P. Siy, A new algorithm for dominant point detection and
polygonization of digital curves, Pattern Recognition 36 (2003) 2239–2251.
[30] M. Marji, P. Siy, Polygonal representation of digital planar curves through
dominant point detection—a nonparametric algorithm, Pattern Recognition 37
(2004) 2113–2130.
[31] A. Masood, S.A. Haq, A novel approach to polygonal approximation of digital
curves, Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation 18 (2007)
264–274.
[32] A. Masood, Dominant point deletion by reverse polygonization of digital curves,
Image and Vision Computing 26 (2008) 702–715.
[33] A. Masood, Optimized polygonal approximation by dominant point deletion,
Pattern Recognition 41 (2008) 227–239.
[34] A. Melkman, J. O'Rourke, On polygonal chain approximation, in: G.T. Toussaint
(Ed.), Computational Morphology, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1998, pp. 87–95.
[35] F. Mokhtarian, A.K. Mackworth, A theory of multiscale-based shape
representation for planar curves, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence 14 (1992) 789–805.
[36] F. Mokhtarian, Silhouette-based isolated object recognition through curvature
scale space, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 17
(1995) 539–544.
[37] R. Neumann, G. Teisseron, Extraction of dominant points by estimation of the
contour fluctuations, Pattern Recognition 35 (2002) 1447–1462.
[38] J.C. Perez, E. Vidal, Optimum polygonal approximation of digitized curves,
Pattern Recognition Letters 15 (1994) 743–750.
[40] A. Pikaz, I. Dinstein, Optimal polygonal approximation of digital curves, Pattern
Recognition 28 (1995) 373–379.
[41] B.K. Ray, K.S. Ray, Detection of significant points and polygonal approximation
of digitized curves, Pattern Recognition Letters 22 (1992) 443–452.
[42] B.K. Ray, K.S. Ray, An algorithm for detecting dominant points and polygonal
approximation of digitized curves, Pattern Recognition Letters 13 (1992)
849–856.
[43] B.K. Ray, R. Pandyan, ACORD—an adaptive corner detector for planar curves,
Pattern Recognition 36 (2003) 703–708.
[44] A. Rosenfeld, E. Johnston, Angle detection on digital curves, IEEE Transactions
on Computers C-22 (1973) 875–878.
[45] A. Rosenfeld, J. Weszka, An improved method of angle detection on digital
curves, IEEE Transactions on Computers (1975) 940–941.
[46] P.L. Rosin, Techniques for assessing polygonal approximation of curves, IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 19 (6) (1997)
659–666.
[47] M. Salotti, An efficient algorithm for the optimal polygonal approximation of
digitized curves, Pattern Recognition Letters 22 (2001) 215–221.
[48] M. Salotti, Optimal polygonal approximation of digitized curves using the sum
of square deviations criterion, Pattern Recognition 35 (2002) 435–443 (Marc
Salotti).
[49] D. Sarkar, A simple algorithm for detection of significant vertices for polygonal
approximation of chain-coded curves, Pattern Recognition Letters 14 (1993)
959–964.
[50] P.A. Semyonov, Optimized unjoined linear approximation and its application for
Eog-biosignal processing, in: 12th IEEE International Conference on Engineering
in Medicine and Biology Society, 1990, pp. 779–780.
[51] I.K. Sethi, R. Jain, Finding trajectories of feature points in a monocular image
sequence, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 9
(1987) 56–73.
[52] C.H. Teh, R.T. Chin, On the detection of dominant points on digital curves, IEEE
Transactions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 11 (1989) 859–872.
[53] C. Urdiales, A. Bandera, F. Sandoval, Non-parametric planar shape representation
based on adaptive curvature functions, Pattern Recognition 35 (2002) 43–53.
[55] W.Y. Wu, Dominant point detection using adaptive bending value, Image and
Vision Computing 21 (2003) 517–525.
[56] W.Y. Wu, An adaptive method for detecting dominant points, Pattern
Recognition 36 (2003) 2231–2237.
[57] P.C. Yuen, Dominant points matching algorithm, Electronic Letters 29 (1993)
2023–2024.
[58] P. Zhu, P.M. Chirlian, On critical point detection of digital shapes, IEEE Trans-
actions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 17 (8) (1995) 737–748.
 A. Carmona-Poyato et al. / Pattern Recognition 43 (2010) 14 -- 25 25

About the Author—F.J. MADRID-CUEVAS received the Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Malaga University (Spain) and the Ph.D. degree from Polytechnic University
of Madrid (Spain), in 1995 and 2003, respectively. Since 1996 he has been working with the Department of Computing and Numerical Analysis of Cordoba University,
currently he is an assistant professor. His research is focused mainly on image segmentation, 2-D object recognition and evaluation of computer vision algorithms.

About the Author—R. MEDINA-CARNICER received the Bachelor degree in Mathematics from University of Sevilla (Spain). He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from
the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain) in 1992. Since 1993 he has been a lecturer of Computer Vision in Cordoba University (Spain). His research is focused on edge
detection, evaluation of computer vision algorithms and pattern recognition.

About the Author—R. MUÑOZ-SALINAS received the Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Granada University (Spain) and the Ph.D. degree from Granada University
(Spain), in 2006. Since 2006 he has been working with the Department of Computing and Numerical Analysis of Cordoba University, currently he is an assistant professor.
His research is focused mainly on mobile robotics, human–robot interaction, artificial vision and soft computing techniques applied to robotics.