Shape Filling Rate for Silhouette Representation and Recognition

Research on complex shape recognition showed that the shape context algorithm is sensitive to relative position variation of articulation. Aimed at this problem, a shape recognition method is proposed based on local shape filling rate of various object silhouettes. We take each landmark point as a circle center and use as its radius. Then, under a particular radius, the ratio between the covered silhouette pixels and the total pixels is defined as local shape filling rate. Thus, different radius may form different local shape filling rates. All landmark points with different radius will constitute a characteristic matrix which can effectively reflects the entire statistical property of the object shape. Experiments on a variety of shape databases show that the novel method is insensitive to articulation and less influenced by the number of landmark points, so our algorithm has strong power in describing object details.