By Mathilde Fichen In the early days of computer vision, when memory was scarce and every byte counted, innovation thrived under constraint. “An Efficient Chain-Linking Algorithm,” developed at Inria in the late 1980s, is a brilliant example of this spirit. Now preserved and shared by Software Heritage, this compact yet powerful piece of C code showcases how elegance and efficiency went hand in hand in outlining the future of image processing—one pixel chain at a time. The code resulted from res...