A novel moments generation inspired by 3D spherical harmonics for robust 2D shape description

This paper presents a novel 2D region-based shape descriptor inspired by 3D spherical harmonics. We propose an adaptation of the 3D spherical harmonics, which provides a novel set of orthogonal harmonic moments defined on a 2D unit disc. A novel generation of region-based shape descriptors is proposed: the disk harmonic moment descriptor (DHMD). This new descriptor is compared with other methods from the same category. Set B of the MPEG-7-CE-1-shape database is used for experimental validation. To benchmark the performance of the compared descriptors precision-recall pair and several statistics provided by the Princeton Shape Benchmark are employed. With its good accuracy in 2D shape retrieval, the proposed descriptor is very useful as a generic shape descriptor for content-based image retrieval applications.