Texture analysis using Gabor wavelets

Receptive field profiles of simple cells in the visual cortex have been shown to resemble even-symmetric or odd-symmetric Gabor filters. Computational models employed in the analysis of textures have been motivated by two-dimensional Gabor functions arranged in a multi-channel architecture. More recently Wavelets have emerged as a powerful tool for non-stationary signal analysis capable of encoding scalespace information efficiently. A multi-resolution implementation in the form of a dyadic decomposition of the signal of interest has been popularised by many researchers. In this paper, Gabor wavelet configured in a 'rosette' fashion is used as a multi-channel ifiter-bank feature extractor for texture classification. The 'rosette' spans 360 degrees of orientation and covers frequencies from DC. In the proposed algorithm, the texture images are decomposed by the Gabor wavelet configuration and the feature vectors corresponding to the mean of the outputs of the multi-channel filters extracted. A minimum distance classifier is used in the classification procedure. As a comparison the Gabor filter has been used to classify the same texture images from the Brodatz album and the results indicate the superior disciiminatory characteristics of the Gabor wavelet. With the test images used it can be concluded that the Gabor wavelet model is a better approximation of the cortical cell receptive field profiles.