Abstract
Many attempts have been made to represent families of 2D as the Symmetry Set (S S ) and a subset of it, the Medial Axis (MA). shapes in a simpler way. These approaches lead to so-called structures In this paper a novel method to represent the S S as a string is presen- ted. This structure is related to so-called arc-annotated sequences, and allows faster and simpler query algorithms for comparison and database applications than graph structures, used to represent the MA. Example shapes are shown and their data structures derived. They show the stability and robustness of the S S and its string representation.