A novel affine invariant curve descriptor based on membrane vibration model is proposed in this paper.This paper focused on two kinds of curves

of which one is Jardon curve and the other is open curve.For the Jardon curve

it was firstly normalized to overcome the influence of affine distortion.The curve descriptors were then obtained by calculating the eigenvalues of Helmholtz equation using the finite element method;For the open curve

its narrowband model region was firstly established by use of Euclidean distance transform.Then the open curves were replaced by the narrowband models.Finally the open curve descriptors were obtained by using the Jardon curve's method.The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing Fourier descriptor and Zernike moment descriptor.