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In this paper we consider some questions related to the orientation of shapes with particular attention to the situation where the standard method does not work. There are irregular and non symmetric shapes whose orientation cannot be computed in a standard way, but in the literature the most studied situations are those where the shape under consideration has more than two axes of symmetry or where it is an n-fold rotationally symmetric shape with n > 2. The basic reference for our work is [11]. We give a very simple proof of the main result from [11] and suggest a modification of the proposal on how the principal axes of rotationally symmetric shapes should be computed. We show some desirable property in defining the orientation of such shapes if the modified approach is applied. Also, we give some comments on the problems that arise when computing shape elongation.

In this paper we define a new linearity measure for open planar curve segments. We start with the integral of the squared distances between all the pairs of points belonging to the measured curve segment, and show that, for curves of a fixed length, such an integral reaches its maximum for straight line segments. We exploit this nice property to define a new linearity measure for open curve segments. The new measure ranges over the interval (0, 1], and produces the value 1 if and only if the measured open line is a straight line segment. The new linearity measure is invariant with respect to translations, rotations and scaling transformations. Furthermore, it can be efficiently and simply computed using line moments. Several experimental results are provided in order to illustrate the behaviour of the new measure.

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