POLYGONAL APPROXIMATION OF PLANAR DIGITAL CURVES USING ANT SYSTEM

摘要

This paper presents a new polygonal approximation method using the ant system. The problem is represented by a directed graph such that the objective of the original problem becomes to find the shortest cycle that satisfies the problem constraints. A number of artificial ants (agents) are distributed on the graph and communicating with one another through the pheromone trails which are a form of the long-term memory recording the positive tours previously constructed. The important properties of the proposed method are thoroughly investigated. The performance of the proposed method compared to those of the genetic-based and the tabu search-based approaches is very promising.