What is contours in computer vision? [closed]

Question

I am currently studying a computer vision module in college. I would like to get a theoretical understanding of what contours are in computer vision and what they are used for.

Answer 1

A contour is simply the boundary of an object in an image. Various representations of contours (e.g. chain code, Fourier descriptors, shape context) are used to recognize or categorize objects.

This assumes that you have a way to segment out an object and find its boundary, which itself is not a trivial problem. One particular class of algorithms for finding boundaries is called active contours or snakes. Is this what you are asking about?

Answer 2

Here you can go through the official documentation of opencv, where they say that contour is a simple curve which joins continuous points with same color or intensity.

I used the concept of contours in hand gesture recognition where i have used the area bounded by contours as a basis to remove the noise and detect only the hand part in the image.