Efficient computation of local geometric moments

Local moments have attracted attention as local features in applications such as edge detection and texture segmentation. The main reason for this is that they are inherently integral-based features, so that their use reduces the effect of uncorrelated noise. The computation of local moments, when viewed as a neighborhood operation, can be interpreted as a convolution of the image with a set of masks. Nevertheless, moments computed inside overlapping windows are not independent and convolution does not take this fact into account. By introducing a matrix formulation and the concept of accumulation moments, this paper presents an algorithm which is computationally much more efficient than convolving and yet as simple.