Distance interior ratio: A new shape signature for 2D shape retrieval

•A novel 2D shape signature named Distance Interior Ratio (DIR) is proposed.•DIR represents an intersection pattern of line segments on a shape contour.•Interval of each bin is defined using to the mean of the distribution method.•Our method achieves higher retrieval rate than other distance distribution methods.•DIR distance can differentiate the distance distributions of homometric pair objects.

In this work, we propose a shape signature named Distance Interior Ratio (DIR) that utilizes intersection pattern of the distribution of line segments with the shape. To improve the efficiency of the histogram-based shape signature, we present a histogram alignment method for adjusting the interval of the histogram according to the distance distribution. The experimental result shows a 3.25% improvement using the proposed histogram alignment. When compared to other shape signatures, our experimental result gives a 77.69% retrieval rate using MPEG7 Part B dataset [Latecki, et al. (2000)[14]].