Image retrieval by shape: A comparative study

Besides traditional applications (e.g., CAD/CAM and Trademark registry), new multimedia applications such as structured video, animation, and MPEG-7 standard require the storage and management of well-defined objects. We focus on shape-based object retrieval and conduct a comparison study on four of such techniques: FD, GB, DT, and MBC - TPVAS. Our results show that the similarity retrieval accuracy of our method (TVPAS) is as good as other methods, while it has the lowest computation cost to generate the shape signatures of the objects. Moreover, it has low storage requirement, and a comparable computation cost to compute the similarity between two shape signatures. In addition, TPVAS requires no normalization of the objects, and is the only method that has direct support for RST query types. In this paper, we also introduce anew shape description taxonomy.