What parts of a shape are discriminative?

Shape is a distinguishing feature of objects. But when objects have similar global shapes, discriminating them becomes difficult. This calls for the identification of important parts of the shapes. In this paper, we introduce the concept of discriminative parts and propose a method to identify the same. We show how levels of importance can be assigned to different regions of contours, based on their discriminative capability. Our experiments show that the method is promising and can identify semantically meaningful segments as being important segments.