Scale specific and robust edge/line encoding with linear combinations of Gabor wavelets

摘要

A method of detection of characteristic orientations of local image structure at a specific scale of analysis and at a specific location is described. The technique is almost immune to noise, and it results in a structural description that can be used by higher level image analysis and pattern recognition algorithms. The approach is based on rather unusual properties of two-dimensional Gabor wavelets, namely their ability to model rotated, scaled, and shifted versions of themselves with linear combinations of a discrete basis set. The paper is concluded with the results of a character recognition experiment, in which a simple template-matching procedure based on the structural description achieved 99.5% correct classification on a test from the NIST database of pre-segmented digits.