Parsing Silhouettes without Boundary Curvature

We describe a new decomposition algorithm for two-dimensional, polygonal shapes. The algorithm first finds a set of overlapping ribbon-like subshapes ("ribbons") by grouping skeleton fragments into long smooth spines. The parts are then obtained by cutting the ribbons along lines of mutual intersection. With this approach we find part cuts that obey heuristic rules of early vision (M. Singh et a., 1999) without using boundary curvature.