With the explosive growth of multimedia applications, the ability to index/retrieve multimedia objects in an efficient way is challenging to both researchers and practitioners. A major data type stored and managed by these applications is the representation of two-dimensional (2D) objects. Objects contain many features (for example colour, texture and shape) that have meaningful semantics. From those features, shape is an important feature that conforms with the way human beings interpret and interact with the real world objects. The shape representation of objects can therefore be used for their indexing, retrieval and as a similarity measure. The object databases can be queried and searched for different purposes. For example, a CAD application for manufacturing industrial parts might intend to reduce the cost of building new industrial parts by searching for reusable existing parts in a database. Regarding an alternative trademark registry application, one might need to ensure that a new registered trademark is sufficiently distinctive from the existing marks by searching the database. Therefore, one of the important functionalities required by all these applications is the capability to find objects in a database that match a given object. Traditional books on computer vision and informational retrieval are too general, and they do not provide advanced or specific information regarding shape analysis and recognition. This text provides a comprehensive survey of the most advanced and powerful shape retrieval techniques used in practice in 2002. In addition, this monograph addresses key methodological issues for evaluation of the shape retrieval methods. The book is designed to meet the needs of practitioners and researchers in industry, and graduate-level students in computer science.