A decision step for Shape Context matching

This work presents a novel contribution in the field of shape recognition, in general, and in the shape context technique, in particular. We propose to address the problem of deciding if two shape context descriptors match or not using an a contrario approach. Its key advantage is to provide a measure of the quality of each match, which is a powerful tool for later recognition processes. We tested the proposed combination of shape context and the a contrario framework in character recognition from license plate images.