Curve segmentation and representation by superellipses

A method of segmenting curves into series of superelliptical arcs is presented. A superellipse is the 2-dimensional form of the superquadratic and can describe circles, ellipses, crosses, parallelograms and rounded rectangles with the same number of parameters. The superellipses are fitted using Powell's technique to minimise an appropriate error metric. A tree is used to represent a number of interpretations and the concept of significance used to choose the most perceptually correct description. Results show that perceptually good features are chosen to represent the various shapes that occur in images.