Improvement of the disc harmonic moments descriptor by an exponentially decaying distance transform

Abstract

The authors propose an improvement of a recent region-based shape descriptor inspired by the 3D spherical harmonics: the Disk Harmonic Moments Descriptor (DHMD). The binary image is weighted by an exponentially decaying distance transform (EDDT) before applying the disc harmonic transform (DHT) introduced recently as a good shape representation. The performance of the improved DHMD is compared to other recent methods from the same category. Set B of the MPEG-7 CE-1-Shape database is used for experimental validation. To benchmark the performance of the compared descriptors precision-recall pair is employed. The proposed approach seems be more efficient and effective if compared to its competitors. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.