N-FOLDED SYMMETRIES BY COMPLEX MOMENTS IN GABOR SPACE AND THEIR APPLICATION TO UNSUPERVISED TEXTURE SEGMENTATION

Complex moments of the Gabor power spectrum yield estimates of the N-folded symmetry of the local image content at different frequency scales, that is, they allow to detect linear, rectangular, hexagonal/triangular, and so on, structures with very fine to very coarse resolutions. Results from experiments on the unsupervised segmentation of real textures indicate their importance for image processing applications. Real geometric moments computed in Gabor space also provide for very powerful texture features, but lack the clear geometrical interpretation of complex moments.