Shape Description and Retrieval Using Included-Angular Ternary Pattern

Shape description is an important and fundamental issue in content-based image retrieval (CBIR), and a number of shape description methods have been reported in the literature. For shape description, both global information and local contour variations play important roles. In this paper a new included-angular ternary pattern (IATP) based shape descriptor is proposed for shape image retrieval. For each point on the shape contour, IATP is derived from its neighbor points, and IATP has good properties for shape description. IATP is intrinsically invariant to rotation, translation and scaling. To enhance the description capability, multiscale IATP histogram is presented to describe both local and global information of shape. Then multiscale IATP histogram is combined with included-angular histogram for efficient shape retrieval. In the matching stage, cosine distance is used to measure shape features' similarity. Image retrieval experiments are conducted on the standard MPEG-7 shape database and Swedish leaf database. And the shape image retrieval performance of the proposed method is compared with other shape descriptors using the standard evaluation method. The experimental results of shape retrieval indicate that the proposed method reaches higher precision at the same recall value compared with other description method.