Shape description and recognition by a multiresolution approach

This paper presents a multiresolution approach that uses a diffusion process to describe the shape of a 2D object. As a result, shape recognition can be achieved: shape contours may be recognized independently from orientation or size. The method proposed relies on the concept of a structural coding of an object at varying levels of resolution. A tree structure represents the evolution of the contour at increasing levels of detail, where each tree node represents a contour segment via a set of attributes to provide a richer description of the image shape. The shape recognition is based on a matching of the attributed tree representation of the candidates with that of the model.