
{"publication_number": "US-5454070-A", "abstract": "computer based images are normally provided in the form of large amounts of data on a pixel by pixel basis . method and apparatus are disclosed for converting this pixel based data to spline based data wherein the characteristics present in the pixel based data are substantially retained in the spline based version of the image .", "application_number": "US-18124894-A", "description": "for the purposes of the preferred embodiment , it can be assumed that the input data used by the method consists of a collection of pixels corresponding to an image , each having separate colour information for red , green and blue colour portions of a particular pixel . the first stage of the preferred embodiment is the generation of pixel regions and planes . a region preferably consists of a four - connected ( 4 - connected ) group of pixels . by four - connected , it is meant that if the pixels are arranged in a grid in which each pixel is represented by a square with four sides . then two pixels are said to be four - connected if they share a common side . a more formal definition of a region is a set of pixels , s , such that for every pair of pixels a \u03b5 s , b \u03b5 s , there exist a vector of pixels of the form ( p 1 , p 2 , . . . , p n ), p 1 = a , and p 2 = b , where n is an integer , n & gt ; 0 , and i \u03b5 { 1 , 2 , . . . , n 