A new shape descriptor based on an angular-linear probability distribution

Motivated by the increased consideration of probability distributions as local descriptors of shape, we propose a local descriptor based on a bivariate circular distribution. Although some bivariate circular distributions are difficult to compute, our descriptor is computationally feasible because it is a generalization of the mixture of von Mises distributions. Using various shapes formed by line drawings, we show that our descriptor is more effective in shape retrieval than several conventional local descriptors.