Search

A method of converting a picture into a "cartoon" S S or map whose regions correspond to differently textured regions is described. Texture edges in the pica hire are detected, and solid regions surrounded by these (usually broken) edges are "colored in" using a propagation process. The resulting map is cleaned by comparing the region colors with the textures of the corresponding regions in the picture, and also by merging some regions with others according to criteria based on topology and size. The method has been applied to the construction of cloud cover maps from cloud cover pictures obtained by satellites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any region can be regarded as a union of maximal neighborhoods of its points, and can be specified by the centers and radii of these neighborhoods; this set is a sort of "skeleton" of the region. The storage required to represent a region in this way is comparable to that required when it is represented by encoding its boundary. Moreover, the skeleton representation seems to have advantages when it is necessary to determine repeatedly whether points are inside or outside the region, or to perform set-theoretic operations on regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]