Strategies for Part-Based Shape Analysis Using Skeletons

Skeletons are often used as a framework for part-based shape analysis. This paper describes some useful strategies that can be employed to improve the performance of such shape matching algorithms. Four key strategies are proposed. The first is to incorporate ligature-sensitive information into the part decomposition and shape matching processes. The second is to treat part decomposition as a dynamic process in which the selection of the final decomposition of a shape is deferred until the shape matching stage. The third is the need to combine both local and global measures when computing shape dissimilarity. Finally, curvature error between skeletal segments must be weighted by the limb-width profile along the skeleton. Experimental results show that the incorporation of these strategies significantly improves the retrieval accuracy when applied to LEMS’s 99 and 216 silhouette database [10].