Fourier Transform to Group Feature on Generated Coarser Contours for Fast 2D Shape Matching

Fourier descriptors are classical global shape descriptors with high matching speed but low accuracy. To obtain higher accuracy, a novel framework for forming Fourier descriptors is proposed and named as MSFDGF (multiscale Fourier descriptor using group feature). MSFDGF achieves multiscale description by generating coarser contours. Then, a group of complementary features are extracted on the generated coarser contours. Finally, Fourier transform is performed on the features. MSFDGF-SH is a new global descriptor using the MSFDGF framework and shape histograms. Experiments are conducted on four databases, which are MPEG-7 CE-1 Part B, Swedish Plant Leaf, Kimia 99 and Expanded Articulated Database, to evaluate the performance of MSFDGF-SH. The experimental results show that MSFDGF-SH is an effective and efficient global shape descriptor. This new descriptor has a high accuracy of 87.76%, which exceeds the Shape Tree on the MPEG-7 CE-1 Part B dataset. This is the first Fourier descriptor that surpasses the Shape Tree method in terms of both accuracy and speed on this dataset.