A PIECEWISE LINEAR-APPROXIMATION METHOD PRESERVING VISUAL FEATURE POINTS OF ORIGINAL FIGURES

We present a method for piecewise linear approximation of digitized planar curves which can compress the amount of data, without loss of perceptual information for human approximation. This method consists of two stages, the uniform process and the recovering process. The method has the following four major merits: (1) Because this method approximates according to the intricacy, it can efficiently approximate figures in which portions of both large and small curvatures coexist. (2) Spikes and corners can be retained. (3) Smooth connecting points are retained. (4) Straight lines in the original figure are directly adopted as approximating line segments. Because of the above merits, our method is applicable to both natural and artificial figures. © 1991.