In this JAVA project, you will be doing some simple image processing operations on what is called chain coding. Chain coding is an efficient process to represent contours and/or edge image information of an image via traversing contours/edges and encoding their direction at each step. This procedure is widely used in image processing applications especially where binary shape coding is required. One example is the Freeman chain code developed in 1961, which is an eight connectivity directional encoding scheme in which a link represents the direction between two points (pixels). This coding scheme consists of eight possible directions numbered from 0-to-7 as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2 provides an example of how to encode a binary image consisting of zeros and ones using Freeman chain code. It starts with an upper left portion of an image where you have 1 (i.e. starting point in the example in Figure 2) and it traverses the image. The link between the first two pixels is to the right, thus it is encoded as zero and so on. Write a simple chain code program and test it on the two images below

The output you get for the first image should be the following: 6, 6, 0, 0, 6, 0, 6, 7, 7

7, 7, 6

The output you get for the second image should be the following: 0, 0, 0, 6, 6, 4, 4, 6, 6

6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 0

Figure 1. Eint directions of Freeman chain code Figure 2. Example of an image being encoded using Freeman chain code Figure 1. Eint directions of Freeman chain code Figure 2. Example of an image being encoded using Freeman chain code