A Curvature Sensitive Filter and its Application in Microfossil Image Characterisation

A new class of oriented, curvature sensitive filters are introduced. These filters provide a low-level detection facility for noisy curves without a prior edge extraction stage. The application of these filters to the detection of Carboniferous Foraminifers (a type of microfossil found in plane rock sections) is described. A symbolic representation of the detected curves is stored in a database which is then queried to recover the required structures. We show that the curves identified by the filter correspond to salient features of the microfossil evidence in the image.