On the exhaustive generation of discrete figures with connectivity constraints

This paper deals with a generalization of polyominoes called (a, b)-connected discrete figures, where a and b respectively denotes the connectivity of the foreground (i.e. black pixels) and background (i.e. white pixels). Formally, a finite set of pixels P is (a, b)-connected if P is a-connected and P̄ is b-connected. By adapting a combinatorial structure enumeration algorithm due to Martin, we successfully generate (a, b)-connected discrete figures up to size n = 18.