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I am about to start research for my thesis. I am trying to find public datasets of images mostly dominated by contour meaning (An outline, esp. one representing or bounding the shape or form of something.)

Can anyone suggest any? Or give directions please?

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I don't know of any dataset specifically, but you can always create your own. I know of a freeware software called ImageJ, which can easily create the outline of multiple images. If you take multiple black & white images and crop them all to the same size, you can easily create a large dataset of outline shapes. – Paul Jul 4 '12 at 17:01

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My answer might still be of interest for others searching large image data-sets or for Light Alchemist in particular if his thesis is running over the course of the entire year.

I recently found this list of image data-sets on the University of Texas at Austin website. It's a collection of links to image data-sets provided by different Universities and Research Institutes. These data-sets can be enormous, for example the NUS-WIDE data-set alone contains +269K images.

This won't provide you with the specific contour images you've asked for. The list does however contain many data-sets of objects on distinct backgrounds. Use edge detection algorithms as stated above and batch process the images to get the desired result.

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You can create contours (not necessarily closed) by running A Canny edge detector on various high contrast images. Just grab a set of images and run a Canny edge detector on them. The output will be a set of contours. You can smooth the images beforehand to make sure you get clean images.

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You can have a look at the wikimedia categories Blueprints, Floor plans, Technical Drawings etc. if you are looking for images which are not dominated by but consist entirely of contours...

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