An Informal Approach to Measuring Tortuosity

Abstract

Tortuosity is an intuitive term used to describe paths on the plane that exhibit multiple twists and turns. It is used in a variety of applications as a measure of how much a path deviates from a straight line, especially to analyze images. However, unlike curvature, tortuosity does not have a good mathematical definition yet. Nor is there a consensus on how to measure tortuosity. This paper examines the information obtained from curvature and how it applies to the measure of tortuosity. Methods from the literature are examined and a new method is proposed using multiple measures instead of a single value.