A Novel Image Retrieval System Using an Effective Region Based Shape Representation Technique

With recent improvements in methods for the acquisition and rendering of shapes, the need for retrieval of shapes from large repositories of shapes has gained prominence. A variety of methods have been proposed that enable the efficient querying of shape repositories for a desired shape or image. Many of these methods use a sample shape as a query and attempt to retrieve shapes from the database that have a similar shape. This paper introduces a novel and efficient shape matching approach for the automatic identification of real world objects. The identification process is applied on isolated objects and requires the segmentation of the image into separate objects, followed by the extraction of representative shape signatures and the similarity estimation of pairs of objects considering the information extracted from the segmentation process and shape signature. We compute a 1D shape signature function from a region shape and use it for region shape representation and retrieval through similarity estimation. The proposed region shape feature is much more efficient to compute than other region shape techniques invariant to image transformation.