Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is one way to go. See Wikipedia here.
The centroid is easy enough to find if your shapes are convex - just a weighted average of intensities over the xy positions - and PCA will give you the major and minor axes, hence the orientation.
Once you have the centre and axes, you have the basis for a set of ellipses that cover your shape. Extending the axes - in proportion - and testing each pixel for in/out, you can find the ellipse that just covers your shape. Or if you prefer, you can project each pixel position onto the major and minor axes and find the rough limits in one pass and then test in/out on "corner" cases.
It may help if you post an example image.