Modified Fourier descriptor for shape feature extraction

A modified Fourier descriptor was presented. Information from a local space can be used more efficiently. After the boundary pixel set of an object was computed, centroid distance approach was used to compute shape signature in the local space. A pair of shape signature and boundary pixel gray was used as a point in a feature space. Then, Fourier transform was used for composition of point information in the feature space so that the shape features could be computed. It is proved theoretically that the shape features from modified Fourier descriptors are invariant to translation, rotation, scaling, and change of start point. It is also testified by measuring the retrieval performance of the systems that the shape features from modified Fourier descriptors are more discriminative than those from other Fourier descriptors.