The information of closed curves obtained from figures is one of important features for describing them. Concerned with such kinds of studies, the feature extraction of a single closed curve has been reported in many papers. In this paper, a method of converting a collection of open-curves into that of the closed curves is proposed by supposing a smooth slope around the region including the curves with levels. As an example, contour lines of mountainous map are processed for obtaining closed contour lines.

As the structural information of characters and figures, features based on closed curves have been used. However, studies of feature extraction methods have been made mainly for a single closed curve. In this paper, a fundamental computer processing system is reported for dealing with very many collections of multiple closed curves which are represented by contour lines of a topographical map. Here, we describe an algorithm for obtaining every string of chain-codes which is local information of a collection of closed curves and a tree structure which is global information of the collection through one directional and a single row-by-row scan. Finally, the results obtained from the application of the proposed algorithm to simple recognition problems of mountains are described.

An extraction method of density contour lines of gray level pictures is described. Two kinds of quads composed of four image pixels and non-image pixels are defined for making the density contour lines simple closed paths. From the resultant density contour lines of simple closed paths, a tree graph is made for executing the recognition of a house included in a monochromatic aerial photo of an urban area.