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~F83. NESTING.
The nesting problem is to decide whether one contour polygon
is within another. Although easy in the two polygon case; solving
the nesting of many polygons with respect to each other becomes
n-squared expensive in either compute time or in memory space. The
nesting solution in CRE sacrifices memory for the sake of greater
speed and requires a 31K array, called the SKY.
CRE's accumulation of a properly nested tree of polygons
depends on the order of threshold cutting going from dark to light.
For each polygon there are two nesting steps: first, the polygon is
placed in the tree of nested polygons by the subroutine INTREE;
second, the polygon is placed in the SKY array by the subroutine
named INSKY.
The SKY array is 216 rows of 289 columns of 18-bit pointers.
The name "SKY" came about because, the array use to represent the
furthest away regions or background, which in the case of a robot
vehicle is the real sky blue. The sky contains vector pointers; and
would be more efficient on a virtual memory machine that didn't
allocate unused pages of its address space. Whereas most computers
have more memory containers than address space; computer graphics
and vision might be easier to program in a memory with more address
space than physical space; i.e. an almost empty virtual memory.
The first part of the INTREE routine finds the surrounder of
a given polygon by scanning the SKY due east from the uppermost left
pixel of the given polygon. The SON of a polygon is always its
uppermost left vector. After INTREE, the INSKY routine places
pointers to the vertical vectors of the given polygon into the sky
array.
The second part of the INTREE routine checks for and fixes
up the case where the new polygon captures a polygon that is already
enclaved. This only happens when two or more levels of the image
have blobs that have holes. The next paragraph explains the arcane
details of fixing up the tree links of multi level hole polygons and
the box following that is a quotation from the appendix of Krakauer
thesis [3] describing his nesting algorithm.~I1973,800;F8- 27 -