Automatic structuring (feature coding and object recognition) of topographic data, such as that derived from air survey or raster scanning large-scale paper maps, requires the classification of objects such as buildings, roads, rivers, fields and railways. The recognition of objects is largely based on the matching of descriptions of shapes. Fourier descriptors, moment invariants, boundary chain coding and scalar descriptors are widely used in image processing and computer vision to describe and classify shapes. They have been developed to describe shape irrespective of position, orientation and scale. The applicability of the above four methods to topographic shapes is described and their usefulness evaluated.