2D shape recognition using biological sequence alignment tools

In this paper a novel 2D shape recognition approach is proposed. The main idea is to exploit in this context the huge amount of work carried out by bioinformati-cians in the biological sequence analysis research field. In the proposed approach, we encode shapes as biological sequences, employing standard and well established sequence alignment tools to devise a similarity score, finally used in a nearest neighbour scenario. Despite its simplicity, obtained results on standard datasets are really encouraging.