An adaptive reduction procedure for the piecewise linear approximation of digitized curves

A new algorithm is presented for the piecewise linear approximation of two-dimensional digitized curves against a square grid. The algorithm utilizes an adaptive reduction procedure in two approximation phases to select the critical points of a digitized curve such that the deviation, from the digitized curve to its final approximated curve, is bounded by a uniform error tolerance. The time complexity of this algorithm is O(m²) rather than O( n²) on the theoretical plane. In the experiments of fixing the initial and the final processing points, the performance of the algorithm has been compared to those of three prominent other algorithms regarding the required number of critical points and the total execution time of the program. Of the four algorithms compared, the present algorithm consistently has the shortest execution time of the program, and it tends most to require as few critical points as the optimum algorithm that was tested