A survey of shape analysis techniques

A Survey of Shape Analysis Techniques
Sven Loncaric Department of Electronic Systems and Information Processing Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb Abbreviated title: A Survey of Shape Analysis Techniques Correspondence address: Sven Loncaric Department of Electronic Systems and Information Processing Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb Unska 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia Phone: [phone], Fax: [phone] E-mail: [e-mail]

A Survey of Shape Analysis Techniques
Abstract
This paper provides a review of shape analysis methods. Shape analysis methods play an important role in systems for object recognition, matching, registration, and analysis. Research in shape analysis has been motivated, in part, by studies of human visual form perception systems. Several theories of visual form perception are brie y mentioned. Shape analysis methods are classi ed into several groups. Classi cation is determined according to the use of shape boundary or interior, and according to the type of result. An overview of the most representative methods is presented. Shape analysis Shape description Image analysis Object recognition

1 Introduction
The input to a typical image processing and analysis system is a gray-scale image of a scene containing the objects of interest. In order to understand the contents of the scene it is necessary to recognize the objects located in the scene. The shape of the object is a binary image representing the extent of the object. The shape can be thought of as a silhouette of the object e.g. obtained by illuminating the object by an in nitely distant light source. There are many imaging applications where image analysis can be reduced to the analysis of shapes, e.g. organs, cells, machine parts, characters. Shape analysis methods analyze the objects in a scene. In this paper, we concentrate on shape representation and description aspects of shape analysis.