Boosting shape classifiers accuracy by considering the inverse shape

Many techniques exist for describing shapes. These techniques almost exclusively consider the contour or the inside of the shape; the major problem for describing the outside of a shape, or inverse shape, being that it has an infinite extension. In this paper, we show how to adapt two shape descriptors, one region based, the Cover By Rectangles, and one transform based, the Zernike moments, to be applicable to the inverse shape. We analyze their properties, and show how to deal with the infinite extension of the inverse shape. Then, we apply these descriptors to shape classification and compare representations that use the shape, its inverse, or both. Our experiments establish that, for shape classification, a representation integrating the inverse shape often outperforms a representation restricted to the shape. This opens the path for better techniques that could use, as a rule of thumb, both the representations of a shape and its inverse for the purpose of classification.