Properties and Performances of Shape Similarity Measures

This paper gives an overview of shape dissimilarity measure properties, such as metric and robustness properties, and of retrieval performance measures. Fifteen shape similarity measures are shortly described and compared. Since an objective comparison of their qualities seems to be impossible, experimental comparison is needed. The Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG), a working group of ISO/IEC has defined the MPGE-7 standard for description and search of audio and visual content. A region based and a contour based shape similarity method are part of the standard. The data set created by the MPEG-7 committee for evaluation of shape similarity measures offers an excellent possibility for objective experimental comparison of the existing approaches evaluated based on the retrieval rate. Their retrieval results on the MPEG-7 Core Experiment Core Experiment Shape-1 test set as reported in the literature and obtained by a reimplementation are compared and discussed. To compare the performance of similarity measures, we built the framework SIDESTEP -- Shape-based Image Delivery Statistics Evaluation Project, http://give-lab.cs.uu.nl/sidestep/