Object Description Based on Spatial Relations between Level-Sets

Object recognition methods usually rely on either structural or statistical description. These methods aim at describing different types of information such as the outer contour, the inner structure or texture effects. Comparing two objects then comes down to averaging different data representations which may be a tricky issue. In this paper, we introduce an object descriptor based on the spatial relations that structures object content. This descriptor integrates in a single homogeneous representation both shape information and relative spatial information about the object under consideration. We use this description in the context of image retrieval and show results on a butterfly image database compared with both GFD and SIFT descriptors. These results show that our method is more efficient to distinguish the objects where the spatial organization is a discriminative feature.