Optimized Multichannel Filter Bank with Flat Frequency Response for Texture Segmentation

Previous approaches to texture analysis and segmentation use multichannel filtering by applying a set of filters in the frequency domain or a set of masks in the spatial domain. This paper presents two new texture segmentation algorithms based on multichannel filtering in conjunction with neural networks for feature extraction and segmentation. The features extracted by Gabor filters have been applied for image segmentation and analysis. Suitable choices of filter parameters and filter bank coverage in the frequency domain to optimize the filters are discussed. Here we introduce two methods to optimize Gabor filter bank. First, a Gabor filter bank with a flat response is implemented and the optimal feature dimension is extracted by competitive networks. Second, a subset of Gabor filter bank is selected to compose the best discriminative filters, so that each filter in this small set can discriminate a pair of textures in a given image. In both approaches, multilayer perceptrons are employed to segment the extracted features. The comparisons of segmentation results generated using the proposed methods and previous research using Gabor, discrete cosine transform (DCT), and Laws filters are presented. Finally, the segmentation results generated by applying the optimized filter banks to textured images are presented and discussed.