VIRMA: Visual Image Retrieval by shape MAtching

The huge amount of image collections connected to multimedia applications has brought forth several approaches to content-based image retrieval, that means retrieving images based on their visual content instead of textual descriptions. In this paper, we present a system, called VIRMA (Visual Image Retrieval by Shape MAtching), which combines different techniques from Computer Vision to perform content-based image retrieval based on shape matching. The architecture of the VIRMA system is portrayed and algorithms underpinning the developed prototype are briefly described. Application of VIRMA to a database of real-world pictorial images shows its effectiveness in visual image retrieval.