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An enhanced shape descriptor based on radial distances

Conference Paper · November 2011

DOI: 10.1109/ICSIPA.2011.6144073 · Source: DBLP

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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

An Enhanced Shape Descriptor Based On Radial Distances

Tiagrajah V. J.1, Muhammad Razeen A. A. S.
Dept of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
College of Engineering, Universiti Tenaga Nasional,
Jalan IKRAM-UNITEN, 43000 Kajang, Selangor
1
tiagrajah@uniten.edu.my

Abstract new focus on developing image indexing techniques

Contour and region based descriptors are among the
main approaches in content based image retrieval
(CBIR). In the contour based approaches, Fourier
Transform is applied on the shape signatures to obtain
Fourier descriptors (FD), which has attractive properties
such as rotational, scale, and translational invariance.
However, the FD derived from different signatures can
have significant effect on the performance of retrieval. In
this paper we introduce a new shape signature, which is
called the radial distance with triangular centroid area
(RDTCA) signature. Based on our retrieval experiments
using Kimia 99 and Kimia 216 dataset, FD derived from
RDTCA signature outperformed the FD derived from
other signatures in terms of robustness and retrieval
performance.
Key Words: CBIR, Shape, Fourier descriptors,
Retrieval.
1. Introduction
Recent years there is the rapid increase of digital
images around the world due to the growing power of
workstations, decreasing storage and processing costs and
the Internet. Variety of image application areas contribute
to the generation of digital image. They have become
more and more dependent on the use of the generated
images. The use of the generated images can help produce
new creations, save time and costs. However, instead of
making things easier, the huge amount of digital images
stored around the world makes the utilization of images
from existing database more difficult than ever. This is
due to the lack of a standard way of indexing and
managing digital images.
Traditionally, images are stored into database using
textual information. The advantage of textual indexing of
image is that it can provide user with key word searching
and catalogue browsing. However, it has limitations. One
is that it is time consuming, when the database is large, it
is almost impossible to manually annotate all the images.
The other is visual features of image are difficult to be
described using words [1]. Therefore, there has been a
which have the capability to retrieve image based on their
contents. The technologies are now referred to as
Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). CBIR is the
retrieval of images based on visual features such as
colour, texture and shape [2].
Shape may be defined as the characteristic surface
configuration of an object, an outline or contour. It
permits an object to be distinguished from its
surroundings by its outline. Shape retrieval involves three
primary issues which are shape representation, shape
similarity measure and shape indexing. Among them,
shape representation is the most important issue in shape
retrieval.
Various shape representation methods, or shape
descriptors, exist in the literature are first classified into
two categories which are region based and contour based.
In region-based techniques, all the pixels within a shape
are taken into account to obtain the shape representation.
In boundary-based shape representation only the outer
boundary of the shape is used. Some of the region based
techniques are geometrical moments [1], pseudo-Zernike
moments [2], Zernike moments [3, 4] and Tchebichef
moments [5]. Many boundary-based techniques have been
proposed in the literature, including Fourier Descriptors
[6], wavelet descriptors [7], and Curvature Scale Space
(CSS) [8]. The most efficient boundary-based technique
was Fourier Descriptors (FDs). With Fourier descriptors,
global shape features are captured by the first few low
frequency terms, while higher frequency terms capture
finer features of the shape. Fourier Descriptors overcomes
the weak discrimination ability of the moment descriptors
and the global descriptors and overcome the noise
sensitivity in the shape signature representations. To
derive the FDs of an image, the 2-D image is converted to
1-D signature. Many signatures have been proposed in the
literature, including centroid distance (CD), complex
coordinate (CC) and cord-length distance (CLD) [9]. In
this paper I propose a new signature, namely Radial
Distance with Triangular Centroid Area (RDTCA), and
compare it with other frequently used shape signature.
The paper is organized as follows: section 2 introduces
the proposed signature. Shape indexing using Fourier
Descriptors discussed in section 3. Experimental results

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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)
are presented in section 4. Finally, conclusion is presented
in section 5.
2. Radial Distance with Triangular Centroid
Area Signature
In this section a new shape signature is introduced,
where the radial distance is combined with triangular
centroid area, referred as RDTCA.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 1 Example of the Radial Distance with Triangular Centroid
Area (RDTCA) signature.
Initially, the preprocessing is performed by tracing the
boundary of the object. The shape coordinates are
assumed to be (x(t), y(t)), t = 0, 1, …, N-1. The
computation of RDTCA signatures can be described by
the following equation.
| 1 1 | (1)
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where 1 , 1 is the next boundary
coordinate after point , , and , is the
centroid of the shape. As illustrated in Fig. 1, the
signature is calculated by adding the Euclidian distances
between point a and the centroid c and the triangular
centroid area formed by point a, the next boundary point
b and the centre of the object. The triangular centroid area
integrates some information on the shape’s area together
with the radial distance, which enhances its robustness.
Fig. 2 shows the RDTCA signatures for shapes from 4
different classes.
Fig. 2 The RDTCA signature for shapes from four different
classes.
3. Derivation of Fourier Descriptors
Fourier descriptors are obtained by applying Fourier
transform on shape boundary usually represented by a
shape signature s(t), the Fourier transformed coefficients
are called the Fourier descriptors FDn, of the shape.
These descriptors represent the shape of the object in a
frequency domain where the first few low frequency
terms capture global shape features of the object and
higher frequency terms capture finer features of the shape.
Discrete Fourier transform for s(t):
1 2
exp
(2)
where 0,1, … , 1
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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

The coefficient bn, n= 0, 1, … N-1, are usually called

Fourier descriptors (FD) of the shape, denoted as FDn, n= Table 1. The first 8 feature vectors consist of Fourier
0, 1, ...., N-1. descriptors with RDTCA signatures of the image of hammer
Since RDTCA is relative to the centroid, FD are with rotational angle of 00, 900, 1800 and 2700.
translation invariant. In Fourier Transform, rotation in
spatial domain means phase-shift in frequency domain so
using magnitude values of coefficients make FD
rotationally invariant. Scale invariance is achieved by by
dividing the magnitude values of FD by the DC
component. The reason of choosing FD0 as the
normalization factor is because it is the average energy of
the signal. Since Radial Distance with Triangular
Centroid Area (RDTCA) is real valued, first half of FDs
are the same with second half. Therefore, first half of the
FD is sufficient to represent a shape. The normalized
invariant feature vector, f, used to index the shape is:
Table 2. The first 8 feature vectors consist of Fourier
descriptors with RDTCA signatures of the image of hammer
| | | | / with spatial resolutions ranging from 512×512 to 32×32.
, ,…, (3)
| | | | | |

Thus, , , ,…, (4)

The invariant features represent the shape of the object

in frequency domain, where the global features are
captured by the first few low frequency terms and finer
features are captured by the high frequency terms. In
some cases, noise component may be located in the higher
frequencies. Thus, selecting the first Nc (< M) terms
would be suitable for pattern classification tasks. An
image of hammer with different rotation angles (00, 900,
1800 and 2700) are shown in Fig. 3.

The standard deviation among the feature vectors, f,

(a) (b) (c) (d)
Fig. 3. Image of hammer with rotational angles of 00, 900,
1800 and 2700.
The first 8 FD values of the RDTCA signatures of the
images of hammer are tabulated in Table 1. Results show
that the standard deviations are very low among the
feature vector , , ,…, for different
rotational angles. This is due to the property of DFT of
being invariant to shapes which are rotated. In order to
analyse the effect of changing spatial resolution, the
invariant feature vector were calculated on the same
image of hammer by varying the spatial resolutions:
512x512, 256x256, 128x128, 64x64 and 32x32. Table 2
shows the result of the first 8 normalised Fourier
descriptor with RDTCA signatures.
are very low and significant difference can be observed
among the mean value of feature vectors. The mean value
of the feature vectors among the images are within the
range of 0.07 to 0.075 for different spatial resolutions,
except, when size of the image is reduced to 32 x 32, the
mean increases to 0.0806. Hence, low spatial resolution
seems to produce feature vectors which are less
prominent. This is due to images with small resolution
will produce less number of boundary coordinates.
The feature vectors were also calculated on images
belonging to 4 different classes (fish, cow, human and ray
fish) to analyse its ability to produce discriminative
features among the classes. A plot of the magnitude of the
feature vector consisting the first 10 Fourier descriptors
are shown below each image in Fig 4. It can be observed
that the magnitudes for within class images are similar
and a significant difference can be noticed for images
from different classes.

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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

Fig. 4 The Fourier Descriptors for shapes from four different
classes.
For shape retrieval tasks, the query shape indexed by
normalised FD features are represented as fm= [fm1, fm2 ,
…, fmNc] and a target shape indexed by normalized FD
features are represented as fd = [fd1, fd2 , …, fdNc], the
Euclidean distance between the two feature vectors can be
calculated by:
Fig. 5 The database of 99 shapes.
Kimia 216 database constructed from samples of a
very large database of shapes created for testing the
compression rates for MPEG7, provided by Latecki et al.
[12]. This database consists of 18 categories: bones,
glasses, and so on with 12 shapes in each category, as
shown in Fig 6.

/ (5)

4. Experiment result
The experiment results for shape retrieval are
composed of two major tasks: the feature extraction and
image recognition. In the feature extraction process, the
feature vector of a shape based image is obtained from the
Fourier Descriptors of the RDTCA signature. Then, the
recognition is performed by calculating the recognition
rate, which compares the accuracy of the features, in
terms of retrieval the same type of images from a
database.
To evaluate the performance of the proposed method,
experiments are conducted on two shape databases
(Kimia 99 and Kimia 216) provided by Kimia’s group
[10, 11]. In Kimia 99 dataset there are 99 shapes in total
from nine categories, including fish, rabbits, airplanes,
grebes, wrenches, hands, humans, quadrupeds and rays.
Each category contains 11 samples. These samples have
variations in form, or are exposed to other influences such
as occlusion, articulation and missing parts [10]. Some Fig. 6 The database of 216 shapes selected from the MPEG-7
samples of shape images from this database are shown in test database [15].
Fig. 5.

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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)
An experimental method recommended in [13],
suggests that each shape is used as a model to be matched
against all the others, and the results are ordered by the
distances between each pair. The nearest matches by
category and the corresponding recognition rates based on
n-th retrieval are presented in Table 3 and Table 4. The
proposed RDTCA signature is compared with the other
best performing signatures, such as centroid distance and
complex coordinate signatures and also the recently
proposed template based shape representation technique
[14].
Table 3. Recognition rate of the top 10 retrieval based on
Kimia 99 database
Based on Table 3, results shows that the proposed
method performed very similar to centroid distance but
outperformed the complex coordinate and template based
shape representation.
Table 4. Recognition rate of the top 10 retrieval based on
Kimia 216 database
Results from Table 4 shows that the proposed method
performed better than centroid distance in the 2nd
retrieval by 1% and all the three methods performed the
same at the 1st retrieval with 100% accuracy. From the
3rd to 11th, the proposed method performed the best at
the 8th, 9th and 11th retrieval and the centroid distance
performed the best at the 4th and 10th retrieval. In overall,
the proposed method performed better than other
methods. Whereas complex coordinate signature’s
performed the worse. The centroid distance and radial
distance with triangular centroid area signatures have
comparable results in smaller database. However, in the
case of large database, the RDTCA performs better than
the centroid distance.
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5. Conclusion
A new Fourier descriptors based on contour based
shape signature was presented in this paper. The proposed
shape signature is obtained by applying the Fourier
Descriptors using radial distance with triangular centroid
area. The proposed method is compared with other shape
signatures such as complex coordinate signature, centroid
distance signature and template-based shape
representation technique using two shape databases
(Kimia 99 and Kimia 216) provided by Kimia’s group
[10, 11]. The experiment results show that the proposed
method and the centroid distance signature yield
comparable results in a small database. However, the
proposed signature performs the best in larger databases.
This is due to the ability of RDTCA signature to capture
both the shape boundary and area information of the
object.
6. Reference
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 2011 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA2011)

Contour,” IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern

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