A comparative study of curvature scale space and Fourier descriptors for shape-based image retrieval

Contour shape descriptors are among the important shape description methods. Fourier descriptors (FD) and curvature scale space descriptors (CSSD) are widely used as contour shape descriptors for image retrieval in the literature. In MPEG-7, CSSD has been proposed as one of the contour-based shape descriptors. However, no comprehensive comparison has been made between these two shape descriptors. In this paper we study and compare FD and CSSD using standard principles and standard database. The study targets image retrieval application. Our experimental results show that FD outperforms CSSD in terms of robustness, low computation, hierarchical representation, retrieval performance and suitability for efficient indexing.