A fast shape descriptor

A new fast shape descriptor, based upon the rapid transformation of Reitboeck and Brody, is presented. The normalized rapid descriptors (NRD) developed here and normalized Fourier descriptors (NFD) are applied to the analyses of some typical 2D images. It is shown that they both have good recognition performance. However, NRD is superior to NFD in computational speed and storage requirements. For several types of airplane photographs, a set of shape analysis experiments were made by means of NRD. The results reveal that the new shape descriptor has satisfactory recognition performance.