Abstract:To describe contours in digital space and simplify the presentation of computer graphics, a wavelet descriptor is presented, which is suitable for contours constructed with a set of points. According to the fact that contours in digital space is periodical, wavelet descriptor is defined based on wavelet analysis of discrete periodic signal. Application of the wavelet descriptor for medical image contour description is achieved. Comparing with Fourier descriptor, this work shows that the contours expressed by wavelet descriptor can make a good shape preserving, and the data for constructing the contours is compressed.