Shape Descriptors for classification of functional data

Curve discrimination is an important task in engineering and other sciences. We propose several shape descriptors for classifying functional data, inspired by form anal- ysis from the image analysis eld: statistical moments, coe cients of the components of independent component analysis (ICA) and two mathematical morphology descrip- tors (morphological covariance and spatial size distributions). They are applied to three problems: an arti cial problem, a speech recognition problem and a biomechan- ical application. Shape descriptors are compared with other methods in the literature, obtaining better or similar performance