Tattoos can provide useful information related to criminal gang activity. Law enforcement can use the information embedded in tattoos to identify and track the criminal history of a suspect. For matching processes, tattoo images are difficult to use due to problems such as deformations and weak edge structures. In this paper we describe a tattoo image retrieval and matching system based on a combination of local and global image matching methods to improve matching accuracy. The proposed local shape context combined with SIFT descriptors are used for local features of a tattoo object and global shape is used for overall shape of a tattoo object. The contributions of this paper include the introduction of a multiple different sizedbin polar histograms based local shape context (MHLC) and a global shape descriptor combining the multiple different sized-bin polar histogram and 2D Fourier Transform for robustness of translation, scale, rotation and shape distortions. We also describe robust similarity for local descriptors and a weighted matching method based on local and global descriptors. Our experimental results show that our proposed method performs better than previously published tattoo image retrieval systems.
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