Chain-based extraction of line segments to describe images

This work presents a novel fast method for line segment extraction, based on a chain code representation of edge maps. It has a parallel nature and can be employed on parallel machines. In the first phase it breaks the macro chains into several micro chains after applying shifting, smoothing and differentiating. The micro chains are then approximated by straight line segments. In the second phase, based on the length and the error criteria, the line segments are grouped into much longer lines. The experimental results show a significant improvement in the number of line segments extracted while their accumulative length keeps high.