Shape retrieval using improved Arc-Height Function

Local boundary information plays an important role in shape description. In this paper, an improved Arc-Height Function is presented for shape description and retrieval. The Improved Arc-Height is independent of centroid distance (CD) and can capture local boundary information very accurately. And an effective fusion strategy is utilized to integrate Fourier features derived from the improved Arc-Height with the ones derived from the CD for shape retrieval. The similarity of two shapes is determined under the Euclidean distance of their corresponding Fourier features. And the experiment results conducted on the MPEG-7 CE-1 Set B contour shape database and Swedish leaf database indicate that the improved method is superior to the other Fourier descriptors including the Arc-Height Radius Complex function, CD, complex coordinates, and farthest point distance.