In this paper, we present a decision level fused local Morphological Pattern Spectrum (PS) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) approach for an efficient shape representation and classification. This method makes use of Earth Movers Distance (EMD) as the measure in feature matching and shape retrieval process. The proposed approach has three major phases: Feature Extraction, Construction of hybrid spectrum knowledge base and Classification. In the first phase, feature extraction of the shape is done using pattern spectrum and local binary pattern method. In the second phase, the histograms of both pattern spectrum and local binary pattern are fused and stored in the knowledge base. In the third phase, the comparison and matching of the features, which are represented in the form of histograms, is done using Earth Movers Distance (EMD) as metric. The top-n shapes are retrieved for each query shape. The accuracy is tested by means of standard Bulls eye score method. The experiments are conducted on publicly available shape datasets like Kimia-99, Kimia-216 and MPEG-7. The comparative study is also provided with the well known approaches to exhibit the retrieval accuracy of the proposed approach.
 We suggest a novel shape contour descriptor for shape matching and retrieval. The new descriptor is called contour points distribution histogram (CPDH) which is based on the distribution of points on object contour under polar coordinates. CPDH not only conforms to the human visual perception but also the computational complexity of it is low. Invariant to scale and translation are the intrinsic properties of CPDH and the problem of the invariant to rotation can be partially resolved in the matching process. After the CPDHs of images are generated, the similarity value of the images is obtained by EMD (Earth Mover's Distance) metric. In order to make the EMD method used effectively for the matching of CPDHs, we also develop a new approach to the ground distance used in the EMD metric under polar coordinates. Experimental results of image retrieval demonstrate that the novel descriptor has a strong capability in handling a variety of shapes. We propose a novel shape descriptor for matching and recognizing 2D object silhouettes. The contour of each object is represented by a fixed number of sample points. For each sample point, a height function is defined based on the distances of the other sample points to its tangent line. One compact and robust shape descriptor is obtained by smoothing the height functions. The proposed descriptor is not only invariant to geometric transformations such as translation, rotation and scaling but also insensitive to nonlinear deformations due to noise and occlusion. In the matching stage, the Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm is employed to find out the optimal correspondence between sample points of every two shapes. The height function provides an excellent discriminative power, which is demonstrated by excellent retrieval performances on several popular shape benchmarks, including MPEG-7 data set, Kimia's data set and ETH-80 data set.