Dorst–Smeulders Coding for Arbitrary Binary Words

A binary word is Sturmian if the occurrences of each letter are balanced, in the sense that in any two factors of the same length, the difference between the number of occurrences of the same letter is at most 1. In digital geometry, Sturmian words correspond to discrete approximations of straight line segments in the Euclidean plane. The Dorst–Smeulders coding, introduced in 1984, is a 4-tuple of integers that uniquely represents a Sturmian word w, enabling its reconstruction using |w| modular operations, making it highly efficient in practice. In this paper, we present a linear-time algorithm that, given a binary input word w, computes the Dorst–Smeulders coding of its longest Sturmian prefix. This forms the basis for computing the Dorst–Smeulders coding of an arbitrary binary word w, which is a minimal decomposition (in terms of the number of factors) of w into Sturmian words, each represented by its Dorst–Smeulders coding. This coding could be leveraged in compression schemes where the input is transformed into a binary word composed of long Sturmian segments. Although the algorithm is conceptually simple and can be implemented in just a few lines of code, it is grounded in a deep analysis of the structural properties of Sturmian words.