ABSTRACT
Introduction The two fundamental problems in a pattern recognition system are feature extraction (shape measurement) and classification. The problem of extracting a vector of shape measurements from a digital image can be further decomposed into three subproblems. The first is the image segmentation problem, i.e., the separation of objects of interest from their background. The cluster analysis methods discussed in Section 54.1 are useful here. The second subproblem is that of finding the objects in the segmented image. An example is the location of text lines in a document as illustrated in Section 54.2. The final subproblem is extracting the shape information from the objects detected. Here there are many tools available depending on the properties of the objects that are to be classified. The Hough transform (Section 54.2), polygonal approximation (Section 54.3), shape measurement (Section 54.4), and polygon decomposition (Section 54.6), are some of the favorite tools used here. Important to many of these tasks is finding a nice viewpoint from which extraction is robust and efficient (Section 54.5). Proximity graphs, discussed in Section 54.2, are used extensively for both cluster analysis and shape measurement.
