This paper presents a new vertex selection scheme for shape approximation. In the proposed method, final vertex points are determined by "two-step procedure". In the first step, initial vertices are simply selected on the contour, which constitute a subset of the original contour, using conventional methods such as an iterated refinement method (IRM) or a progressive vertex selection (PVS) method In the second step, a vertex adjustment Process is incorporated to generate final vertices which are no more confined to the contour and optimal in the view of the given distortion measure. For the optimality of the final vertices, the dynamic programming (DP)-based solution for the adjustment of vertices is proposed. There are two main contributions of this work First, we show that DP can be successfully applied to vertex adjustment. Second, by using DP, the global optimality in the vertex selection can be achieved without iterative processes. Experimental results are presented to show the superiority of our method over the traditional methods.