Using Curvature Information in the Decomposition and Representation of Planar Curves

This paper describes a new symbolic representation for planar curves. This representation is based on a segmentation of the curve based on regions of uniform curvature. Rather than smooth noisy data before doing the decomposition, the technique defines a family of functions that extract the segments of the curve as part of the smoothing process. The representation decomposes the curve at multiple scales and the parts produced appear to correspond to a natural decomposition of the curve. It also allows for multiple descriptions of some parts of the curve. The final representation can be rendered compact, avoids several common disadvantages in noisy curve description, and should be useful for recognition.