A graded approach to shape representation

Abstract

Human beings perceived real-world objects in a graded manner, with macroviews providing global information about the objects and microviews providing more detailed information. Consequently, researchers in computer vision have directed their efforts toward building graded representations of objects, especially shapes of objects. Most previous approaches employed operations such as smoothing, blurring, or grouping to gradually obtain representations with different degrees of detail. Parameters of these operations are used to indicate the degree of detail, One objection to using operator parameters is that these parameters are difficult for viewers to interpret intuitively. To overcome this objection, we propose using a graded approach guided by a given similarity requirement to construct a more concise shape description. Our shape representation matches human intuition about detailing degree and suits machine requirement for concise description. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.