Autonomous grouping of contour-segments using an adaptive region-growing algorithm

We propose a new method to automatically group edge-segments (extracted from an image) into a fully connected line-drawing. Unlike some other methods, this algorithm does not assume that the result is topologically simple (i.e. composed of simple closed curves) but is able to recover more complicated, and therefore salient, topological features such as T-junctions. The method is based on a region-growing algorithm which uses stochastically obtained geometric information to halt the region expansion