An efficient boundary encoding scheme which is optimal in the rate distortion sense

In this paper, we present a fast and optimal method for the lossy encoding of object boundaries which are given as 8-connect chain codes. We approximate the boundary by a polygon and consider the problem of finding the polygon which can be encoded with the smallest number of bits for a given maximum distortion. The presented scheme is an extension of the approaches introduced in [l, 2], in that the admissible polygon vertices belong to a band around the original boundary and a new vertex encoding scheme is proposed.