8. Conclusions

Figure 24. An example of a free-floating node.

Raster to vector conversion can be done efficiently in an exact and near optimal manner. Several aspects remain to be attended to. In this program all nodes are treated as fixed, thus to join the free floating lines to the nodes short join vectors are added. Considerable savings in the number of vectors could be achieved by constraining the first vector to go through the start node and the last vector to go through the end node. This should be a simple extension to the program involving merely some extra programming effort. Ideally the nodes themselves should be free-floating, as in Figure 24. However, if the nodes were free-floating for some pathological cases all nodes and strings would have to be in memory simultaneously.

The methods of parsing and line space constraints could be used on more general thinning algorithms.

Finally, the implementation of this project demonstrated that

1. Object Oriented Programming will be an important component of future software systems.
2. Current offerings in OOP field are inadequate in terms of error detection.