An elastic partial shape matching technique

We consider the problem of partial shape matching. We propose to transform shapes into sequences and utilize an algorithm that determines a subsequence of a target sequence that best matches a query. In the proposed algorithm we map the problem of the best matching subsequence to the problem of a cheapest path in a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The approach allows us to compute the optimal scale and translation of sequence values, which is a nontrivial problem in the case of subsequence matching. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the commonly used techniques in retrieval accuracy. (c) 2007 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.