A Novel RLE-based Smoothing method for Thresholded Binary Images

Due to simplicity of the RLE representation, a simple binary contour smoothing method for the RLE data is proposed in this paper. The new method smoothes horizontal, vertical, and diagonal out-spikes of the foreground regions with only one-pixel-width on their outer and inner binary contours. The new smoothing method has several advantages. It is very fast and can remove ‘n’ (n > = 2) consecutive and nested out-spikes by a single traversal of a region boundary. In comparison with morphological operations, it not only smoothes the boundaries of foreground binary regions but it can also preserve their shapes with no or very little distortion. The obtained results show the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with standard morphological operators.

Keywords:

RLE , binary image contours , boundary extraction , smoothing