Applications of the discrete Hodge Helmholtz decomposition to image and video processing

Abstract

The Discrete Hodge Helmholtz Decomposition (DHHD) is able to locate critical points in a vector field. We explore two novel applications of this technique to image processing problems, viz., hurricane tracking and fingerprint analysis. The eye of the hurricane represents a rotational center, which is shown to be robustly detected using DHHD. This is followed by an automatic segmentation and tracking of the hurricane eye, which does not require manual initializations. DHHD is also used for identification of reference points in fingerprints. The new technique for reference point detection is relatively insensitive to noise in the orientation field. The DHHD based method is shown to detect reference points correctly for 96.25% of the images in the database used. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.