Variable length chain coding with applications

A special scheme for coding a digitized picture is presented. This scheme encodes a picture by coding boundaries of areas in the picture as sets of line segments. It is shown that this scheme is superior to the conventional schemes in terms of the data compression factor and faithful reproduction of the picture. One specific application of this scheme is in template matching. Experimental results are presented which show that template matching using this scheme is faster than the conventional template matching technique by a factor of at least 1