A SHAPE FEATURE EXTRACTION FOR COMPLEX TOPOGRAPHICAL IMAGES

Topographical images, in case of aerial or satellite images, are usually similar in colors and textures, and complex in shapes. Thus we have to use shape features of images for efficiently retrieving a query image from topographical image databases. In this paper, we propose a shape feature extraction method which is suitable for topographical images. This method, which improves the existing projection in the Cartesian coordinates, performs the projection operation in the polar coordinates. This method extracts three attributes, namely the number of region pixels, the boundary pixel length of the region from the centroid, the number of alternations between region and background, along each angular direction of the polar coordinates. It extracts the features of complex shape objects which may have holes and disconnected regions. An advantage of our method is that it is invariant to rotation/scale/translation of images. Finally we show the advantages of our method through experiments by comparing it with CSS which is one of the most successful methods in the area of shape feature extraction