I’d like to be able to find the best fitting polygonal approximation of a closed path (could be any path as they’re being pulled out of images) but am having issues with how to approach coding an algorithm to find it.
I can think of a naive approach: every x amount of pixels along the path, choose the best fit line for those pixels, then brute force for different starting offsets and lengths and find the one that minimizes the least-square error with the minimum amount of lines.
There’s got to be something more elegant. Anyone know of anything? Also, (cringe) but this is going to be implemented in javascript unless I get really desperate, so nice libraries that do things for you are pretty much ruled out, (opencv has a polygonal fitter for instance).
D3.js1 has some adaptive resampling code that you might be able to use. There’s also an illustrated description of the algorithm used (Visvalingam’s algorithm).