The Selection of Natural Scales in 2D Images Using Adaptive Gabor Filtering

This paper analyzes how the natural scales of the shapes in 2D images can be extracted. Spatial information is analyzed by multiple units sensitive to both spatial and spatial-frequency variables. Scale estimates of the relevant shapes are constructed only from strongly responding detectors. The meaningful structures in the response of a detector (computed through 2-D Gabor ltering) are, at their natural level of resolution, relatively sharp and have well-de ned boundaries. A natural scale is so de ned as a level producing local minimum of a function that returns the relative sharpness of the detector response ltered over a range of scales. In a second stage, to improve a rst crude estimate of the local scale, the criterion is also rewritten to directly select scales at locations of signi cant features of each activated detector.