Abstract
In this article the use of shape features in content-based image retrieval is studied. The emphasis is on such techniques, which do not demand object segmentation. Pic-SOM, the image retrieval system used in the experiments, requires that constant-sized feature vectors for which the Euclidean distance can be used as a similarity measure represent features. The shape features suggested here are edge histograms and Fourier-transform-based features computed for an edge image in Cartesian and polar coordinate planes. The results show that both local and global shape features are important clues of shapes in an image.