Recent years have seen dramatic progress in shape recognition algorithms applied to ever-growing image databases. They have been applied to image stitching, stereo vision, image mosaics, solid object recognition and video or web image retrieval. More fundamentally, the ability of humans and animals to detect and recognize shapes is one of the enigmas of perception.

The book describes a complete method that starts from a query image and an image database and yields a list of the images in the database containing shapes present in the query image. A false alarm number is associated...