Scale and the Shape/Texture Continuum
Eric Saund
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Abstract
This paper is about the way that spatial scale mediates the
relationship between visual shape and visual texture. We seek
ultimately representations for significant image events that will
support multiple later visual processes, including refinement and
exploitation of figure/ground relations (segmentation), indexing and
matching with object and scene models, and directing visual attention
for the selection and application of further processing steps. These
representations should support description of a scene in abundant detail
and multiple levels of abstraction, yet favor omission of information
that is unlikely to be useful. We introduce the notion of a
texture scale-space making explicit the relationship between two scales
of interest, the characteristic grain size of image elements, and the
size of a frame of view. The analysis entails consideration of several
interrelated concepts, including the notion of an image feature, frame
of view, spatial coherence, scale-dependent representation of shape,
feature uniformity in a region, and odd-man-out phenomena. We describe
experiments with two algorithmic approaches, one based in spatial
filtering, the other in fine-to-coarse spatial aggregation of discrete
events.
Paper (25.5M compressed to 2.7MK)
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