Digital geometry

Digital geometry is the study of geometrical properties of subsets of digital images. If the digitization is sufficiently fine-grained, such properties can be regarded as approximations to the corresponding properties of the sets that gave rise, by digitization, to the digital sets; but it is also important to define how the properties can be computed for the digital sets themselves. Questions of particular interest include how images and image subsets are digitized; how geometric properties are defined for digitized sets; the computational complexity of computing them--in particular, whether they can be computed using simple (e.g., local) operations; characterizing image operations that preserve them; and characterizing digital objects that could be the digitizations of real objects that have given geometric properties. Concepts that have been extensively studied include topological properties (connected components, boundaries); curves and surfaces; straightness, curvature, convexity, and elongatedness; distance, extent, length, area, surface area, volume, and moments; shape description, similarity, symmetry, and relative position; shape simplification and skeletonization.