Abstract: Shape matching of complex shapes with articulation is a difficult problem, it is also an important problem in pattern recognition. Considering the contour of shape, this paper proposes a shape matching method which based on the inner distance shape context. First, we define a distance measure called inner-distance, which is insensitive to shape articulation and non-rigid deformation,it is often more discriminative than the Euclidean distance for complex shape. Then the Euclidean distance of shape context is directly replaced by the inner-distance. Finally, we use dynamic programming based method for shape matching. The inner-distance is insensitive to shape articulation and non-rigid deformation,it is often more discriminative than the Euclidean distance for complex shape, thus the method can effectively deal with shape with articulation and non-rigid deformation. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve good results for shape matching with articulation and non-rigid deformation.