A Generic Shape/Texture Descriptor Over Multiscale Edge Field: 2-D Walking Ant Histogram

A novel shape descriptor, which can be extracted from the major object edges automatically and used for the multimedia content-based retrieval in multimedia databases, is presented. By adopting a multiscale approach over the edge field where the scale represents the amount of simplification, the most relevant edge segments, referred to as subsegments, which eventually represent the major object boundaries, are extracted from a scale-map. Similar to the process of a walking ant with a limited line of sight over the boundary of a particular object, we traverse through each subsegment and describe a certain line of sight, whether it is a continuous branch or a corner, using individual 2-D histograms. Furthermore, the proposed method can also be tuned to be an efficient texture descriptor, which achieves a superior performance especially for directional textures. Finally, integrating the whole process as feature extraction module into MUVIS framework allows us to test the mutual performance of the proposed shape descriptor in the context of multimedia indexing and retrieval.