A Novel Curvature Estimator for Digital Curves and Images
 We propose a novel curvature estimation algorithm which is capable of estimating the curvature of digital curves and two-dimensional curved image structures. The algorithm is based on the conformal projection of the curve or image signal to the two-sphere. Due to the geometric structure of the embedded signal the curvature may be estimated in terms of first order partial derivatives in ?3. This structure allows us to obtain the curvature by just convolving the projected signal with the appropriate kernels. We show that the method performs an implicit plane fitting by convolving the projected signals with the derivative kernels. Since the algorithm is based on convolutions its implementation is straightforward for digital curves as well as images. We compare the proposed method with differential geometric curvature estimators. It turns out that the novel estimator is as accurate as the standard differential geometric methods in synthetic as well as real and noise perturbed environments.