• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.427-439
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• 2006

The SBF (Simple Boundary Follower) is a boundary-following algorithm, and is used mainly for image recognition and presentation. The SBF is very popular because of its simplicity and efficiency in tracing the boundary of an object from an acquired binary image; however, it does have two drawbacks. First, the SBF cannot consistently process inner or inner-outer corners according to the follower's position and direction. Second, the SBF requires movement operations for the non-boundary pixels that are connected to boundary pixels. The MSBF (Modified Simple Boundary Follower) has a diagonal detour step for preventing inner-outer corner inconsistency, but is still inconsistent with inner-corners and still requires extra movement operations on non-boundary pixels. In this paper, we propose the ISBF (Improved Simple Boundary Follower), which solves the inconsistencies and reduces the extra operations. In addition, we have classified the tour maps by paths from a current boundary pixel to the next boundary pixel and have analyzed SBF, MSBF, and ISBF. We have determined that the ISBF has no inconsistency issues and reduces the overall number of operations.