A novel method for two-dimensional curve normalization with respect to affine transformations is presented in this paper, allowing an affine-invariant curve representation to be obtained without any actual loss of information on the original curve. It can be applied as a pre-processing step to any shape representation, classification, recognition or retrieval technique, since it effectively decouples the problem of affine-invariant description from feature extraction and pattern matching. Curves estimated from object contours are first modeled by cubic B-splines and then normalized in several steps in order to eliminate translation, scaling, skew, starting point, rotation and reflection transformations, based on a combination of curve features including moments and Fourier descriptors.