Gabor functions versus circular-Mellin features for texture segmentation

Abstract

Texture is an important preattentive cue in region-based segmentation of images. In this paper, we provide an objective comparison of the properties of the Gabor functions and the circular- Mellin features for texture segmentation. The Gabor functions provide a spectral decomposition of a windowed image about a unique spatial frequency in the Cartesian coordinate system. The circular-Mellin operators represent the spectral decomposition of the image scene in the polar-log coordinate system and are invariant to both scale and orientation of the target. Coupled with the unique shift invariance property of the correlator architecture, these circular-Mellin operators can be used for rotation- and scale-invariant feature extraction. We note that while both these feature extractors have similar functional form, the distortion- invariant characteristics of the circular-Mellin operators make them preferable for texture segmentation. Segmentation results to demonstrate their salient properties are presented.