Multiscale Rician Approach to Gabor Filter Design for Texture Segmentation

Gabor filters have been applied successfully to the segmentation of textured images. Previous investigators have used banks of Gabor filters, where the filter parameters were predetermined ad hoc and not necessarily optimized for a particular task. Other investigators have proposed using filters tuned to dominant components in the FFT of constituent textures. More recent work presented a Gabor filter design method using a Rician distribution to characterize the filtered textures. The present work addresses the design of a single Gabor filter to segment multiple textures and is based on using the Rician distribution at two different scales of the Gabor-filter envelope. Furthermore, variable degrees of postfiltering and the accompanying effect on postfilter output statistics are considered.