Boundary extraction

[Portalife]

Hello,

Can anyone let me know if there is a way to take an image (say an image of an alphabet letter) and perform some sort of boundary extraction on it so that i will get a bunch of points that basically forms an outline of the text (including holes in letters like 'o', 'b', and 'D') that i can then save into a text file that i can read with another program.

Thanks

[Athar]

Transform your image into a gradient image (by determining how much each pixel differs from the left, top or all surrounding pixels). To work with images, you can use FreeImage(Plus):
http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/

[Portalife]

Hi,

Thank you very much. Also is there any way to handle the fonts in windows? I want to be able to do some sort of boundary extraction on each letter and then save the data to a text file with which i can read in another c++ program and see the the data on each letter so i can convert them to vectors. Basically i want to be able to take a letter and get do boundary extraction on it so the end result is sort of a dot-to-to representation of the silhouette of the letter. I heard of something along the lines of a marching man algorithm but had no luck finding any information.