Circular-Mellin features for texture segmentation.

Texture is an important cue in region-based segmentation of images. We provide an insight into the development of a new set of distortion-invariant texture operators. These "circular-Mellin" operators are invariant to both scale and orientation of the target and represent the spectral decomposition of the image scene in the polar-log coordinate system. Coupled with the unique shift invariance property of the correlator architecture, we show that these circular-Mellin operators can be used for rotation-and scale-invariant feature extraction. We note that while these feature extractors have a functional form that is similar to the Gabor operators, they have distortion-invariant characteristics unlike the Gabor functions that make them more suitable for texture segmentation. A detailed analytical description of these operators and segmentation results to highlight their salient properties are presented.