Texture segmentation by variational methods

Abstract

We present a novel texture segmentation algorithm which is affine invariant. We prove that the texton densities (affine invariant orientation channels) can be computed using affine invariant intrinsic neighborhoods and affine invariant intrinsic orientation matrices. We discuss several possibilities for the definition of the channels and give comparative experimental results where an affine invariant Mumford-Shah type energy functional is used to compute the multichannel affine invariant segmentation. We prove that the method is able to retrieve faithfully the texture regions and to recover the shape from texture information in images where several textures are present.