Textual description of shapes

Abstract

We propose in this paper a method for textual description of shape. In the first, we propose a part-based method for the decomposition of outline shape into parts and separating lines. These elements are described geometrically and written with a structured text. In the next we propose the representation of shape by a tree structure where nodes are the internal regions, and arcs correspond to the inclusion relation between these regions. The tree structure is translated to a structured text where is associated for each node a set of attributes such as the description of the outline region, its color and its position. A set of applications of this descriptor are proposed. We show how to decode and visualize the shape from its descriptor and how to retrieve a shape query using shapes database. To do this, a shape similarity is defined and extracted directly from the descriptor. Experiments conducted over real images of various silhouettes and shapes are presented and discussed.