A contour-based part segmentation algorithm

Within the framework of a suggested vision system, a new part segmentation algorithm based on the contour of an object, assumed to be obtained from an edge detector is presented. A new approach is presented to extract the convex dominant points (CDPs) of the contour which are used to decompose the object into convex parts. Among all the points of the contour only the CDPs are moved along their normal until they touch another moving CDP or a point on the contour. The algorithm has been tested on many contours of objects with and without noise. The results are compared to other techniques based on a graph theoretic approach. The results appear to give a closer decomposition to the one performed by humans