Evaluation of MPEG-7 shape descriptors against other shape descriptors

Shape is an important image feature-it is one of the primary low level image features exploited in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). There are generally two types of shape descriptors in the literature: contour-based and region-based. In MPEG-7, the curvature scale space descriptor (CSSD) and Zernike moment descriptor (ZMD) have been adopted as the contour-based shape descriptor and region-based shape descriptor, respectively. In this paper, the two shape descriptors are evaluated against other shape descriptors, and the two shape descriptors are also evaluated against each other. Standard methodology is used in the evaluation. Specifically, we use standard databases, large data sets and query sets, commonly used performance measurement and guided principles. A Java-based client-server retrieval framework has been implemented to facilitate the evaluation. Results show that Fourier descriptor (FD) outperforms CSSD, and that CSSD can be replaced by either FD or ZMD.