In this paper we explored the possibility of exploiting bioinformatics concepts, tools and solutions to address the 2D shape classification problem. In our framework, the contour of a 2D shape is encoded using the chain code, and then transformed into biological sequences through three encoding strategies. We then employ biological sequence alignment tools to compute a similarity measure between sequences/shapes, and we use a KNN classification approach.
We also proposed some tailoring of the biological sequence alignment tools, which take into account the specific application scenario. Experimental results, on five benchmark datasets, confirm the potentials of the proposed scheme. We also carried out a further analysis to investigate the use of other bioinformatics tools and concepts to deeper inspect the unsatisfactory results obtained in the retrieval case