Abstract
A shape-recognition method is proposed, inspired from the dynamic-link theory of von der Malsburg (1981). The quality of a match between two images is assessed through an elastic cost functional; the minimal value reached by the cost over a suitably-defined space of maps is viewed as a distance between these two images. Experiments on nearest-neighbour classification of handwritten numerals are presented, using a computationally effective procedure for finding a reliable estimate of the matching distance.