Curved inertia frames and the skeleton sketch: Finding salient frames of reference

The author introduces curved inertia frames (CIFs), a new definition of curved axes of inertia. A scheme is given for finding a frame of reference of a shape in an image based on such a definition and the author discusses how the frame can be used to describe the shape. The scheme assigns a saliency measure to each component of the reference frame that is a measure of its relevance, so that large and central parts play a more central role in the description of the shape. The scheme also computes a major axis that is used to organize the description of the shape, so that a canonical description can be obtained. One of the features of the scheme is its tolerance to noisy and spurious data. Several perceptual phenomena observed in humans such as grouping based on symmetry and environment bias in shape description can be reproduced naturally in this scheme