Novel affine-invariant curve descriptor for curve matching and occluded object recognition

The authors present a new approach for affine distorted planar curve matching and exploit it for occluded object recognition. There are two main contributions in the study: First, a novel affine-invariant curve descriptor (AICD) based on a new-defined affine-invariant signature and its unsigned sum is proposed to represent the local shape of a curve with high distinctiveness. Second, a part-to-part curve matching algorithm is developed by combining AICD with a curve segmentation strategy based on inflexion points, which can be applied to object recognition under affine distortions and partial occlusions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits effectiveness in occluded object recognition better than the state-of-the-art partial curve matching methods.