A novel contour function

Arc-Height Radius Complex function (AHRC)

is proposed for shape description.AHRC captures the global feature and local detail information of the shape through extracting the centroid distance and signed arc-height features from the shape contour.The Fourier coefficients of AHRC are utilized to construct the feature vector for shape description.The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the standard MPEG-7 shape database and the leaf shape database which is captured from the real world.The experimental results of image retrieval show that the proposed method outperforms the other Fourier descriptors including centroid distance

triangle area

farther-point distance

angle radius and wavelet Fourier descriptors.