Curvedness of a line picture

摘要

The shape analysis of a binary picture is of great importance for pictorial pattern recognition. In this paper, we propose a useful geometric feature parameter called curvedness. Curvedness represents which lines are dominant in a binary picture, straight or curved. Our algorithm for measuring curvedness is based on the relationship between the distance to a boundary point on each black point along each quantized direction and the mean width of a binary picture. We investigate the fundamental property of curvedness. The experimental results for Japanese Hiragana and Kanji characters show the validity of curvedness.