Symbolic representation of two-dimensional shapes

In this paper, we present a method for representing a two-dimensional shape by symbolic features. A shape is represented in terms of multi-interval valued type features. A similarity measure defined over symbolic features that is useful for retrieval of shapes from a shape database is also presented. Unlike other shape representation schemes, the proposed scheme is capable of preserving both contour as well as region information. The proposed method of shape representation and retrieval is shown to be invariant to image transformations (translation, rotation, reflection and scaling) and robust to minor deformations and occlusions. Several experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the methodology and also to highlight its advantages over an existing methodology.