Tree searched chain coding for subpixel reconstruction of planar curves

Coding schemes for the quantization of line drawings that outperform basic chain codes are investigated. First, subpixel accuracy reconstruction is obtained by a simple linear filtering of the chain code points, which achieves a factor-of-three to-four reduction in average reconstruction distortion for smooth curves. Second, the basic chain encoding schemes are generalized to a multipath-tree-searched encoding scheme. A variation of the (M,L)-algorithm is used to maintain M contending chain code paths in storage and choose the best path from these. Over a wide variety of source curves, tree-searched chain coding results in nearly an order of magnitude reduction in average reconstruction distortion over smoother chain codes. The performance improvement for curves is obtained with only a slight increase in bit rate over basic chain codes