REPRESENTING CURVES AT THEIR NATURAL SCALES

The shapes of curves generally contain several structures at different scales. An expressive curve representation should explicitly describe each structure at its appropriate scale. This greatly simplifies any reasoning processes (e.g. matching) applied to the curve. Rather than exhaustively represent the curve over a full range of scales just the most significant ones should be retained for a compact and useful representation. A technique is presented that identifies the significant or natural scales in a curve.