ECDS: An Effective Shape Signature Using Electrical Charge Distribution on the Shape

A shape signature is defined as any 1-D function on a shape, which is a compact and concise representation for some essence of the shape. Although a variety of shape signatures are proposed and utilized in shape retrieval and recognition tasks, the existing signatures cannot yet provide entirely satisfactory solutions to describe the shape variations well, especially when significant noise or articulation occurs. Motivated by the fact that electrical charge distributions are almost the same for similar shapes but not vice versa when shapes reach their electrical equilibrium condition, we propose a novel shape signature based on the electrical charge distribution on the shape (ECDS). Compared to other shape descriptors, ECDS is more intuitively and robust, which is computed in a global manner. Furthermore, as well as being invariant to translation, scale and rotation, ECDS is articulation insensitive and therefore exhibits better performance by the introduction of generalized coulomb potentials. This allows it to better match shapes whose parts can move independently, such as scissors. Finally, numerous experiments have done on public databases, demonstrating that ECDS has the above properties and compares well with other shape descriptors in many kinds of shape retrieval and recognition tasks.