In this paper, we identify some of the limitations of current-day shape matching techniques. We provide examples of how contour-based shape matching techniques cannot provide a good match for certain visually similar shapes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a perceptually motivated variant of the well-known shape context descriptor. We identify that the interior properties of the shape play an important role in object recognition and develop a descriptor that captures these interior properties. We show that our method can easily be augmented with any other shape matching algorithm. We also show from our experiments that the use of our descriptor can significantly improve the retrieval rates.
Most approaches equate the task of shape-matching to the matching of the respective object boundaries. The shape boundaries are discretized into a set of @math landmark points, @math , for easier representation and matching. @cite_10 showed that these points could be located at any place on the object boundary and that they need not be restricted to extrema points on the curve. They also proposed to describe the shape using shape contexts at each of these sampled points. The shape context at each sampled point is given by the relative distribution of the rest of the @math points, which is represented as a 2-D histogram of distances and angles.
@cite_10
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We present a novel approach to measuring similarity between shapes and exploit it for object recognition. In our framework, the measurement of similarity is preceded by: (1) solving for correspondences between points on the two shapes; (2) using the correspondences to estimate an aligning transform. In order to solve the correspondence problem, we attach a descriptor, the shape context, to each point. The shape context at a reference point captures the distribution of the remaining points relative to it, thus offering a globally discriminative characterization. Corresponding points on two similar shapes will have similar shape contexts, enabling us to solve for correspondences as an optimal assignment problem. Given the point correspondences, we estimate the transformation that best aligns the two shapes; regularized thin-plate splines provide a flexible class of transformation maps for this purpose. The dissimilarity between the two shapes is computed as a sum of matching errors between corresponding points, together with a term measuring the magnitude of the aligning transform. We treat recognition in a nearest-neighbor classification framework as the problem of finding the stored prototype shape that is maximally similar to that in the image. Results are presented for silhouettes, trademarks, handwritten digits, and the COIL data set. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for contour based object detection. Compared to previous work, our contribution is three-fold. 1) A novel shape matching scheme suitable for partial matching of edge fragments. The shape descriptor has the same geometric units as shape context but our shape representation is not histogram based. 2) Grouping of partial matching hypotheses to object detection hypotheses is expressed as maximum clique inference on a weighted graph. 3) A novel local affine-transformation to utilize the holistic shape information for scoring and ranking the shape similarity hypotheses. Consequently, each detection result not only identifies the location of the target object in the image, but also provides a precise location of its contours, since we transform a complete model contour to the image. Very competitive results on ETHZ dataset, obtained in a pure shape-based framework, demonstrate that our method achieves not only accurate object detection but also precise contour localization on cluttered background. We develop an approach to object recognition based on matching shapes and using a resulting measure of similarity in a nearest neighbor classifier. The key algorithmic problem here is that of finding pointwise correspondences between an image shape and a stored prototype shape. We introduce a new shape descriptor, the shape context, which makes this possible, using a simple and robust algorithm. The shape context at a point captures the distribution over relative positions of other shape points and thus summarizes global shape in a rich, local descriptor. We demonstrate that shape contexts greatly simplify recovery of correspondences between points of two given shapes. Once shapes are aligned, shape contexts are used to define a robust score for measuring shape similarity. We have used this score in a nearest-neighbor classifier for recognition of hand written digits as well as 3D objects, using exactly the same distance function. On the benchmark MNIST dataset of handwritten digits, this yields an error rate of 0.63 , outperforming other published techniques. We introduce a new shape descriptor, the shape context, for measuring shape similarity and recovering point correspondences. The shape context describes the coarse arrangement of the shape with respect to a point inside or on the boundary of the shape. We use the shape context as a vector-valued attribute in a bipartite graph matching framework. Our proposed method makes use of a relatively small number of sample points selected from the set of detected edges; no special landmarks or keypoints are necessary. Tolerance and or invariance to common image transformations are available within our framework. Using examples involving both silhouettes and edge images, we demonstrate how the solution to the graph matching problem provides us with correspondences and a dissimilarity score that can be used for object recognition and similarity-based retrieval.