Shape Matching Using Chord-Length Function

Bin Wang1, and Chaojian Shi1,2

1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Fudan University,
Shanghai, 200433, P.R. China
2
Merchant Marine College, Shanghai Maritime University,
Shanghai, 200135, P.R. China
wangbin.cs@fudan.edu.cn, cjshi@shmtu.edu.cn

Abstract. A novel shape descriptor, chord length function (CLF) which

can be obtained by equal arc length partitions of a contour, is proposed.
The difference of two shapes is measured by the distance between their
corresponding CLF. The proposed CLF is invariant to rotation, scaling
and translation. It is robust to noise and simple to compute. Experimen-
tal results indicate that CLF is an effective shape descriptor.

1 Introduction
Shape matching is one of the most important tasks in computer vision and
pattern recognition. Shape description is key to shape matching. A good shape
description scheme is expected to possess the following properties: (1) Invariance
to rotation, scaling and translation. (2) Robustness to noise. (3) Simplicity in
computation. (4) Reflecting both global and local shape characteristics.
A widely used shape description scheme is contour function [1]. The basic idea
is to reduce a 2-D shape to a 1-D function, which is easier to handle than the
original shape [2]. The primary consideration for the contour functions include
the choice of the variable and the choice of the geometric quantity as the value
for the function to take. Two candidate variables are in frequent use: one is the
angle from a given direction (Fig. 1a), the other is the arc length from a given
starting point (Fig. 1b). Most of the existing contour functions can be classified
as function of angle or function of arc length.
Distance-versus-angle function (DAF)[1] and curvature function (CF) [3] are
two widely used contour functions. On the choice of the variable, DAF chooses
the angle from given direction as its variable. The potential drawback is that
some contours cannot be described as 1-D functions through DAF because some
angle may correspond to several different distance values (Fig. 2). Different from
DAF, CF chooses the arc length from the starting point as variable, the main
advantage is that CF always exists for any contour.
On the choice of the characterizing geometric quantity, DAF adopts the dis-
tance between the contour points and the contour’s centroid as the function
value. As the centroid is collectively determined by the whole contour, the dis-
tance from the contour points to the centroid reflects the contour shape in a

Corresponding author.

E. Corchado et al. (Eds.): IDEAL 2006, LNCS 4224, pp. 746–753, 2006.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006
 Shape Matching Using Chord-Length Function 747

Fig. 1. Two candidate variables that can be chosen. (a) Angle from a given direction.
(b) Arc length from a given starting point.

Fig. 2. Multiple intersections and distances

global manner. CF, on the other hand, uses the curvature on the contour points
as the function value. Curvature describes the extent to which the contour bends.
The curvature at a point on the contour can be obtained by computing the re-
ciprocal of the radius of the osculating circle [4] (Fig. 3). As such, CF reflects
the local property of the contour and its global characterizing ability is limited.
Here, we give an example for illustrating this fact. Fig. 4 shows two shapes, their
local features (wavy lines) are very similar, if we use curvature to characterize
the contour, it will be very difficult to distinguish them. In contrast, if we use
the distance to the contour to characterize the contour, we can distinguish them
easily.
In this paper, we propose a novel contour function, chord length function
(CLF), which is obtained through partitioning a contour into arcs of the same
length. It combines the advantages of DAF and CF and overcomes their draw-
backs. That is: (1) CLF exists for arbitrary contour. (2) CLF globally reflects the
shape while the local features are also considered. (3) CLF is robust to noise and
simple to compute. The experimental results show its promising performance.

2 Chord Length Function

A contour can be denoted as a sequence of N points C = {x0 , x1 , . . . , xN −1 },

N
−1
where the next point to xN −1 is x0 . Let L = d(xi , xi+1 ) be its perimeter
i=0
748 B. Wang and C. Shi

Fig. 3. The computation of the curvature on a point of a contour

Fig. 4. Two shapes with similar local features

and D = max d(xi , xj ) be its diameter, where d(.) denotes the Euclidean
0≤i,j≤N −1
distance metric. Let us start from a point xi ∈ C and follow the contour anti-
clockwise to divide it into k sections, x i s1 , s xi , of equal arc length
1 s2 , . . . , sk−1
and obtain k − 1 chords xi s1 , xi s2 , . . . , xi sk−1 , where sj is the jth division point
and k > 1 is a pre-specified parameter. We now have k − 1 chord lengths
(i) (i) (i) (i)
L1 , L2 , . . . , Lk−1 , where Lj is the length of the chord xi sj . Fig. 5 shows
an equal arc length partition of a contour at point xi into eight segments. As
(i)
the point xi moves along the contour, the chord length Lj vary accordingly,
(i)
where j = 1, . . . , k − 1. In other words, Lj are function of xi . Without loss
of generality, we specify x0 as the reference point. Then each point xi can be
uniquely identified with the length li ∈ [0, L] of arc x 0 xi . Therefore each chord
(i)
length Lj can be considered as a function of arc length li . Then we obtain a
set of chord length functions Φ = {L1 , L2 , . . . , Lk−1 }.
It can be seen that each function in Φ is invariant to rotation and translation.
To make it invariant to scaling, we use the perimeter L and the diameter D to
normalize respectively the arc length and chord length. Then each function in Φ
will be linearly rescaled to a function from [0, 1] to [0, 1]. Chord length function
is also robust to noise. Fig. 6 gives an example to illustrate it. In Fig. 6, there are
two shapes, one is a rectangle and the other is a noised rectangle. Their chord
length functions with parameter k = 2 are compared. The result is shown in (c)
of Fig. 6. From the comparison, we can see that there is little difference between
them. So the chord length function is not sensitive to noise. Note that changing
the location of the reference point x0 by an amount t ∈ [0, 1] along the perimeter
of contour C corresponds to a horizontal shift of the function Li and it is simple
to compute the new function Li (l + t). From the definition of CLF, we can see
that k is the only parameter of the proposed method. CLF with small parameter
 Shape Matching Using Chord-Length Function 749

Fig. 5. An example of emanating seven chords from a contour point to partition the
contour into eight equal-length arcs

Fig. 6. An example for illustrating the chord length functions’ robustness to noise. (a)
rectangle. (b) noised rectangle. (c) Comparison of their chord length functions with
parameter k=2.

k will be prone to characterize the shape’s global feature, while CLF with large
parameter k will reflect both global and local shape characteristics. Therefor, if
we expect higher accuracy in shape distinction, k will be set lager.

3 Difference Measure
We have presented a CLF description Φ = {L1 , L2 , . . . , Lk−1 } for a contour. The
comparison of two shapes can be performed using their associated CLFs, namely,
the degree to which shape A and shape B are different can be measured by the
(A) (A) (A) (B) (B) (B)
distance between ΦA = {L1 , L2 , . . . , Lk−1 } and ΦB = {L1 , L2 , . . . , Lk−1 }
using a metric for function spaces such as the LP metrics. To remove the de-
pendence of the description on the reference point, we shift the reference point
along the contour of B by an appropriate amount t ∈ [0, 1], then each function
(B) (B)
Li (s) in ΦB will be changed into Li (s + t). We need to find the minimum
750 B. Wang and C. Shi

Fig. 7. Images of test shapes used in literature [5]

over all such shift t to find the appropriate one. So we define the L1 distance
between A and B as
 k  
 1 (A) (B)
dif f (A, B) = min | Li (s) − Li (s + t) | ds . (1)
t∈[0,1] 0
i=1

4 Experimental Results and Discussions

The performance of the proposed CLF is tested on the benchmark shapes used in
literature [5] as shown in Fig. 7. The benchmark shapes includes nine categories
and eleven instances are included in each categories to allow for variations in
form, as well as for occlusion, articulation, missing parts, etc., resulting in a
total of 99 shape instances. The size of each image in Fig. 7 ranges from 120 × 91
pixels to 148 × 148 pixels.
We select two widely used contour functions, distance-versus-angle function
(DAF) and curvature function (CF), for comparison. A task of shape retrieval is
conducted using DAF, CF and the proposed CLF respectively, on the benchmark
shapes. Common performance measures, precision and recall of the retrieval [6,7],
are used as the evaluation of the query result. In this evaluation scheme, each
shape in the benchmark is taken as a query to match all the other shapes. Top n
matched shapes are returned and the number of similar shapes of the same class
was counted in these returned shapes, where n equals 11 in our experiments.
The precision p and recall r are calculated as

p = c/m, r = c/n (2)

 Shape Matching Using Chord-Length Function 751

where c is the number of the returned shapes which are in the same class as that
of the query shape, m is the number of returned shapes and n is the number
of the shapes which are in the same class (n=11 in this case). When 11 top
matched shapes are returned, the precision is the same as the recall. Since there
are 11 shapes in the same class, there is no need to report the precision for the
number of the returned shapes being greater than 11. For m = 1, 2, . . . , 11, the
average precision and recall of all the queries are calculated and a precision-recall
plot for each method are presented as shown in Fig. 8, where the parameter for
the proposed method CLF is set to k = 2, 4 and 8 respectively. The horizon-
tal axis in such a plot corresponds to the measured recall, while the vertical
axis corresponds to precision. Since precision and recall values are computed
from m = 1 to 11, where m is the number of the returned shapes, each curve
contains exactly 11 points. The top-left point of a precision/recall curve cor-
responds to the precision/recall values for the best match, i.e, m = 1, while
the bottom-right point corresponds to the precision/recall values on the case of
m = 11.
A method is better than another if it achieves better precision and recall.
From the Fig. 8, the proposed method CLF with parameter k = 4 and 8 achieves
higher precision and recall than the methods DAF and CF. Therefore we can
see that the proposed CLF with parameter k = 4 and 8 is better than DAF
and CF. It is noted that the two precision/recall curves, which correspond to
the method DAF and the proposed CLF with k = 2 respectively, intersect. This
means that DAF perform better when the the number of returned shapes m is
small (m <= 9), while the proposed CLF with k = 2 perform better when m is
larger (m > 9). Since the method achieving higher precision and recall for the
lager number of returned shapes is considered to be the better method [8], the
proposed method CLF with parameter k = 2 is also better than the method
DAF.
From the above experimental results, we can also see that, for the proposed
CLF, the larger the parameter k is, the better the retrieval performance is. This
is because with the parameter k increased, the more local information of the
shape can be obtained, in other words, the more details of the shape can be
characterized. So the shape will be described more accurately.
Invariance to rotation, scaling and translation is a basic requirement for a good
shape descriptor. For examining the invariance of CLF, the following experiments
are conducted.
For all the 99 shapes as shown in Fig. 7, we increase them in scale by 400%,
scale them down by 50% and simultaneously scale them down by 50% and rotate
them by 900 . Through these geometric transformations, we obtain three new
shape sets. Then each original shape in Fig. 7 is used as a query to match all the
three new shape sets respectively. The resulting precision-recall plot are shown
in Fig. 9. From it, we can see that, using the proposed CLF, the results of
retrieving are nearly identical regardless of their scale and rotation. Therefore,
the proposed CLF is an invariant shape description method.
752 B. Wang and C. Shi

Fig. 8. The resulting precision-recall plot for distance-versus-angle function (DAF), cur-
vature function (CF) and the proposed CLF with parameter k = 2, 4 and 8 respectively

Fig. 9. The precision-recall plot for the three shape sets obtained by different geometric
transformations of the images in Fig. 7

5 Conclusion

The proposed chord length function (CLF) is a simple and effective shape de-
scription method. It is obtained using the equal arc length partitions of a contour.
The proposed CLF is invariant to rotation, scale and translation and robust to
noise. It can capture both global feature and local feature of the contour and it
 Shape Matching Using Chord-Length Function 753

is simple to compute. The experiment results show that it performs better than
two widely used descriptors.

Acknowledgement
The research work in this paper is partially sponsored by Shanghai Leading
Academic Discipline Project, T0603.

References
1. Voldymyr V. Kindratenko, “On Using Functions to Describe the Shape,” Journal
of Mathematical Imaging and Vision”, 18, 225-245, (2003).
2. Rafael C. Gonzalez, Richard E. Woods, “Digital Image Processing,” , 2, 648-649.
3. C.-L. Huang and D.-H Huang, “A Content-Based Image Retrieval System” Image
and Vision Computing, 16, 149-163, (1998).
4. Francisco J. Sanchez-Marin, “The Curvature Function Evolved in Scale-Space as a
Representation of Biological Shapes” Comput. Biol. Med, 27, 77-85, (1997).
5. Thomas Bernier, Jacques-Andre Landry, “A New Method for Representing and
Matching Shapes of Natural Objects,” Pattern Recognition, 36, 1711-1723, (2003).
6. A.D. Bimbo, “Visual Information Retrieval,” Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.,
San Fancisco, USA, 56-57, (1999).
7. G.Salton, “The State of Retrieval System Evaluation,” Inform. Process. Manage,
28 (4), 441-450, (1992).
8. G.Salton, “Matching and Retrieval of Distorted and Occluded Shapes Using Dy-
namic Programming,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machinge In-
telligence, 24 (11), 1501-1516 (2002).