Advances in Computational Intelligence

There are many applications in different fields, as diverse as computer graphics, medical imaging or pattern recognition for industries, where the use of three dimensional objects is needed. By the nature of these objects, it is very important to develop thrifty methods to represent, study and store them. In this paper, a new method to encode surfaces of three-dimensional objects that are not isomorphic to the plane is developed. In the proposed method, a helical path that covers the contour is obtained and then, the Freeman F26 chain code is used to encode the helical path. In order to solve geometric problems to find optimal paths between adjacent slices, a modification of the A star algorithm was carried out. Finally, our proposed method is applied to three-dimensional objects obtained from real data.