Contour coding based on the decomposition of line segments

Abstract This paper proposes an information-preserving contour coding scheme based on the decomposition of the original chain code into the smoothed code and its difference code. High data compression can be achieved by applying entropy coding technique to the proposed algorithm. This proposed algorithm using decomposition is combined with the fixed- or variable-length coding schemes to compare its performance to those of the conventional coding algorithms. Since the proposed algorithm is so simple, it can be adopted to other contour coding algorithms for high data compression.