Combinatorial structure of rigid transformations in 2D digital images

Rigid transformations are involved in a wide range of digital image processing applications. When applied on discrete images, rigid transformations are usually performed in their associated continuous space, requiring a subsequent digitization of the result. In this article, we propose to study rigid transformations of digital images as fully discrete processes. In particular, we investigate a combinatorial structure modelling the whole space of digital rigid transformations on arbitrary subset of Z 2 of size N × N. We describe this combinatorial structure, which presents a space complexity O ( N 9 ) and we propose an algorithm enabling to construct it in linear time with respect to its space complexity. This algorithm, which handles real (i.e., non-rational) values related to the continuous transformations associated to the discrete ones, is however defined in a fully discrete form, leading to exact computation.