Textual description of shapes

We propose in this paper a method for textual description of shape. In the first, we propose a part-based method for the decomposition of outline shape into parts and separating lines. These elements are described geometrically and written with a structured text. In the next we propose the representation of shape by a tree structure where nodes are the internal regions, and arcs correspond to the inclusion relation between these regions. The tree structure is translated to a structured text where is associated for each node a set of attributes such as the description of the outline region, its color and its position.A set of applications of this descriptor are proposed. We show how to decode and visualize the shape from its descriptor and how to retrieve a shape query using shapes database. To do this, a shape similarity is defined and extracted directly from the descriptor.Experiments conducted over real images of various silhouettes and shapes are presented and discussed.