  When comparing 2D shapes, a key issue is their normalization. Translation and
scale are easily taken care of by removing the mean and normalizing the energy.
However, defining and computing the orientation of a 2D shape is not so simple.
In fact, although for elongated shapes the principal axis can be used to define
one of two possible orientations, there is no such tool for general shapes. As
we show in the paper, previous approaches fail to compute the orientation of
even noiseless observations of simple shapes. We address this problem. In the
paper, we show how to uniquely define the orientation of an arbitrary 2D shape,
in terms of what we call its Principal Moments. We show that a small subset of
these moments suffice to represent the underlying 2D shape and propose a new
method to efficiently compute the shape orientation: Principal Moment Analysis.
Finally, we discuss how this method can further be applied to normalize
grey-level images. Besides the theoretical proof of correctness, we describe
experiments demonstrating robustness to noise and illustrating the method with
real images.
