Curve discrimination is an important task in engineering and other sciences. We propose several shape descriptors for classifying functional data, inspired by form analysis from the image analysis field: statistical moments, coefficients of the components of independent component analysis, and two mathematical morphology descriptors (morphological covariance and spatial size distributions). These are applied to three problems: an artificial problem, a speech recognition problem, and a biomechanical application. Shape descriptors are compared with other methods in the literature, with better or similar performance obtaining.