Compression of image contours using combinatorial optimization

Compression of image contours is an important problem in many contexts. An example is object oriented video coding, where efficient encoding of shape information of arbitrarily shaped objects is a major problem. This paper presents a method for compressing contours by extracting representative points from the original curve. By formulating the point selection problem as a graph theory problem, known optimization theory can be applied in order to yield optimal compression with respect to a given error bound. The contour is reconstructed based on linear interpolation among the extracted curve points. The method presented guarantees a minimal distortion for a given number of retained curve points. Compared to many other compression methods, this method shows superior performance