In this paper, a multiscale contour steered region integral (MCSRI) method is proposed to classify highly similar shapes with flexible interior connection architectures. A component distance map (CDM) is developed to robustly characterize the flexible interior connection structure, shape of the exterior contour, and their inter-relationship in a shape image. A novel multiscale region transform (MReT) is proposed to perform region integral over different contour-steered strips at all possible

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... les to effectively integrate patch features, and thus enables a better description of the shape image in a coarse-to-fine manner. It is applied to solve a challenging problem of classifying cultivars from leaf images, which is a new attempt in both biology and computer vision research communities. A soybean cultivar leaf vein database (SoyCultivarVein), which is the first cultivar leaf vein database, is created and presented for performance evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods in similar shape classification and the possibility of cultivar recognition via leaf pattern analysis, which may lead to a new research interest towards fine-level shape analysis on cultivar classification. INDEX TERMS Cultivar classification, multiscale region transform, component distance map, structure pattern analysis.