Several existing DSS (digital straight line segment) recognition algorithms can be used to determine the digital straightness of a given one-pixel-thick digital curve. Because of the inherent geometric constraints of digital straightness, these algorithms often produce a large number of segments to cover a given digital curve representing a real-life object=image. Thus, a curve segment, which is not exactly digitally straight, but appears to be visually straight, is fragmented into multiple DSS when these algorithms are run. In this paper, a new concept of approximate straightness is introduced by relaxing certain conditions of DSS, and an algorithm is described to extract those segments from a digital curve. The number of such segments required to cover the curve is found to be significantly fewer than that of the exact DSS-cover. As a result, the data set required for representing a curve also reduces to a large extent. The extracted set of segments can further be combined to determine a compact polygonal approximation of a digital curve based on certain approximation criteria and a specified error tolerance. The proposed algorithm involves only primitive integer operations and thus runs very fast compared to those based on exact DSS. The overall time complexity becomes linear in the number of points present in the representative set. Experimental results on several digital curves demonstrate the speed, elegance and efficacy of the proposed method.

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The problem of constructing a tight isothetic outer (or inner) polygon covering an arbitrarily shaped 2D object on a background grid, is addressed in this paper, and a novel algorithm is proposed. Such covers have many applications to image mining, rough sets, computational geometry, and robotics. Designing efficient algorithms for these cover problems was an open problem in the literature. The elegance of the proposed algorithm lies in utilizing the inherent combinatoral properties of the relative arrangement of the object and the grid lines. The shape and the relative error of the polygonal cover can be controlled by changing the granularity of the grid. Experimental results on various complex objects with variable grid sizes have been reported to demonstrate the versatility, correctness, and speed of the algorithm.