Abstract

The perception of shape is an important factor in the recognition of an object by the human visual system. This alone justifies the investigation and use of shape descriptors for machine recognition of objects. Shape also has the desirable qualities of being invariant to lighting conditions, changes in sensor parameters or variations in the associated electronics. Some sets of shape descriptors (eg. Fourier descriptors and moment invariants) have other restrictions on their use such as requiring complete and perfect knowledge of the shape boundary. Recent results reported by [1] used the Fourier Mellin transform in the recognition of aircraft with missing pieces. This technique produces inconsistent feature estimates and the reported experiment used an inadequate number of test samples.

© 1985 Optical Society of America