In many image analysis applications, such as image retrieval, the shape of an object is of primary importance. In this paper, a new shape descriptor, namely the Normalized Wavelet Descriptor (NWD), which is a generalization and extension of the Wavelet Descriptor (WD), is introduced. The NWD is compared to the Fourier Descriptor (FD), which in image retrieval experiments conducted by Zhang and Lu, outperformed even the Curvature Scale Space Descriptor (CSSD). Image retrieval experiments have been conducted using a dataset containing 2D-contours of 1400 objects extracted from the standard MPEG7 database. For the chosen dataset, our experimental results show that the NWD outperforms the FD.
