Abstract:Retrieving similar images from a large dataset based on the image content has been a very active research area and is a very challenging task. Studies have shown that retrieving similar images based on their shape is a very effective method. For this purpose a large number of methods exist in literature. The combination of more than one feature has also been investigated for this purpose and has shown promising results. In this paper a fusion based shapes recognition method has been proposed. A set of local boundary based and region based features are derived from the labeled grid based representation of the shape and are combined with a few global shape features to produce a composite shape descriptor. This composite shape descriptor is then used in a weighted ranking algorithm to find similarities among shapes from a large dataset. The experimental analysis has shown that the proposed method is powerful enough to discriminate the geometrically similar shapes from the non-similar ones.