It is well known that the shape of a binary object is
entirely defined by its contour. A simple and effective
representation of the contour is given by the Freeman’s
chain code. This representation has been used in this
work. The chain code allows the extraction of some
useful characteristics of a binary object such as perimeter, centroid, inertial and static moments. The
perimeter P can be used to compute another feature,
namely the compactness C, defined as,