Texture segmentation using circular-Mellin operators

Texture is an important preattentive cue in region-based segmentation of images. In this paper, we discuss the use of circular-Mellin features for segmenting an image into homogenous regions. 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 to the Gabor functions, the distortion-invariant characteristics of the circular-Mellin operators make them preferable for texture segmentation. Segmentation results to demonstrate their salient properties are presented