Discriminating shape descriptors based on connectivity [shape representation for content-based image retrieval]

We propose a method for enhancing the accuracy of shape descriptors. The concept of connectivity to obtain discriminating shape descriptors, is introduced. We show how connectivity is applied to two popular shape descriptors. Experiments are performed to test the effect of using connectivity with generic Fourier descriptors and distance histograms. Item S8 within the MPEG-7 still images content set is used for performing experiments. This dataset consists of 3621 still images. The experimental results show that connectivity enhances the performance of the methods significantly.