Shape Matching by Curve Modelling and Alignment

Automatic information retrieval in the field of shape recognition has been widely covered by many research fields. Various techniques have been developed using different approaches such as intensity-based, modelbased and shape-based methods. Whichever is the way to represent the objects in images, a recognition method should be robust in the presence of scale change, translation and rotation. In this paper we present a new recognition method based on a curve alignment technique, for planar image contours. The method consists of various phases including extracting outlines of images, detecting significant points and aligning curves. The dominant points can be manually or automatically detected. The matching phase uses the idea of calculating the overlapping indices between shapes as similarity measures. To evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm, two databases of 216 and 99 images have been used. A performance analysis and comparison is provided by precision-recall curves. Key–Words: Curve alignment, Information retrieval, Object recognition, Image indexing, Precision-recall.