Connected component detection is an elementary and time-consuming operation in digital image processing. It is widely applied in pattern recognition

characteristic extraction

image understanding and so on. For the purpose of increasing efficiency of connected component detection

based on claaical data structure "queue"

This paper develops a new data structure called "rectangular queue". A fast algorithm for connected component detection of small rectangular areas of a binary image by using the new data structure is also proposed. The new algorithm can be used to detect connected components of pixels in a small not only square area but also rectangular area. It can also be used to detect both horizontal lines and vertical lines in an image. Based on some experiments

the conclusion is obtained that the speed of the new algorithm increases by over one times compared with the currently available ones. The algorithm has been applied to extract point symbols

linear features and further linear features with different width from binary image.