Characterization of right-handed and left-handed shapes

Many natural shapes are chiral (or handed). Our hands, for example, have a right-hand version and a left-hand version, the two types being mirror images of each other. Molecules are also classified according to their chirality, which determines their chemical characteristics. Glucose, for example, is sweet only in one chirality, while it is tasteless in the other. The notion of chirality for two-dimensional binary shapes is studied, and scales for quantitative assessment of the degree of shape-chirality are developed. The chirality measures are based on boundary analysis, and perform well on shapes with natural variations, scaling differences or digitization errors. The measures can also be used with partially occluded shapes, and provide indications on the change of chirality as resolution changes.