Shape matching using morphological structural shape components

A morphological shape decomposition algorithm was recently introduced that allows a shape to be represented as a collection of modestly overlapped disk components. In this paper, we present a shape matching algorithm that is based on this decomposition algorithm. The matching algorithm matches two shapes by matching their disk components. A local descriptor that contains both geometric and structural information is built for each disk component. Such descriptors are used to determine the matching of disk components from two shapes. The overall similarity score is established by combining scores from matching individual disk components. The experiments show that the algorithm is tolerant to scale and rotation changes. An advantage of the algorithm is that the matching can be done at different levels of details.