The perceptual graph: A new algorithm

One of the major tools in the daily routine world of image processing is certainly... the lightpen. A contour which should be closed is broken. A moving particle has a continuous trajectory, but a camera will see only a dotted trail. Single cells overlap, and one wishes to separate them. The algorithm we propose here, which connects neighbouring points or particles, will bring a solution in such situations. Noteworthy is the fact that the execution time does not depend upon the number of points to be processed. Two particles are to be connected if in a given sense, the are neighbours. The neighborhood criterion used here goes back to Dirichlet and Delaunay. For its nice visual properties S. Sternberg called the result perceptual graph.