Wimmelbild Analysis with Approximate Curvature Coding Distance Images

We consider a task of tracing out target figures hidden in teeming figure pictures come to known as Wimmelbild(er). Wimmelbild is a popular genre of visual puzzles; a timeless classic for children, artists and cognitive scientists. Particularly suited to the considered task, we propose a diffuse representation which serves as a heuristic approximation mimicking curvature coding distance images. Curvature coding distance images received increased attention in recent years. Typically, they are computed as solutions to variants of Poisson PDE. The proposed approximation is based on erosion of the white space (background) followed by isotropic averaging, hence, does not require solving a PDE. © 2013 Springer-Verlag