Automated extraction of the shoe lasts contour

It introduces the study on the extraction of the shoe-lasts contour from the scanned date set of a shoe-last surface automatically. A digital shoe-last model was formed with a set of plane curves. Salient points on all the curves were detected on the basis of their curvatures and were used to form the contour of the shoe last. The three-points-circle method was used to determine the curvatures, and the curve-fitting technique of least-square method was use to smoothed the curve. Effort was made to improve the efficiency, accuracy and stability of the contour extraction. The process was programmed with MATLAB.