Two measures of similarity between contours, the 1 st-order similarity measure and the 2nd-order similarity measure are proposed. They are based on the residual errors of the least squares fit. In particular, the 2nd-order similarity measure has a good reliability with respect to contours of many variations such as imperfection, affine transform or combination of these properties. By taking experiments of aircraft identification and recognition we show that in the matching performance the 2nd -order similarity measure is superior not only to the 1 st-order similarity measure but also to the previous matching techniques.