Aggregating contour fragments for shape classification

In this paper, we address the problem of building a compact representation for shape. We first decompose shape into meaningful contour fragments, and each fragment is described by a certain descriptor, e.g., Shape Context. Then inspired by the coding scheme Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors widely used in image representation, we try to aggregate the contour fragments into a very compact vector of limited dimension to stand for a shape, and we name the new designed shape descriptor as Vector of Aggregated Contour Fragments (VACF). We apply VACF to shape classification task on the well-known MPEG-7 shape benchmark, and the experimental results show that the accuracy of our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms with much smaller memory usage.