Shape matching and object recognition via common base triangle area descriptor

To obtain high recognition accuracy with low time complexity and to reduce the influence of contour deformation due to noise in shape matching, a novel shape matching method based on common base triangle area is proposed. Firstly, a common base triangle area descriptor of each contour point is defined based on the area functions of the triangles formed by its two neighbor points and other contour points. Then the descriptor is local smoothed to keep more compact and robust to noise. Secondly, a match cost matrix is obtained by computing the common base triangle area descriptors of all the contour points on two shapes. Finally, the similarity between two shapes is measured on the basis of the match cost matrix by dynamic programming algorithm (DP). The experimental results indicate that this method is robust to contour deformation, and both the computational efficiency and the retrieval rate are essentially improved.