A comparison between extinction filters and attribute filters

Abstract

Attribute filters and extinction filters are connected filters used to simplify greyscale images. The first kind is widely explored in the image processing literature, while the second is not much explored yet. Both kind of filters can be efficiently implemented on the max-tree. In this work, we compare these filters in terms of processing time, simplification of flat zones and reduction of max-tree nodes. We also compare their influence as a pre-processing step before extracting affine regions used in matching and pattern recognition. We perform repeatability tests using extinction filters and attribute filters, set to preserve the same number of extrema, as a pre-processing step before detecting Hessian-Affine and Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) affine regions. The results indicate that using extinction filters as pre-processing obtain a significantly higher (more than 5% on average) number of correspondences on the repeatability tests than the attribute filters. The results in processing natural images show that preserving 5% of images extrema using extinction filters achieve on average 95% of the number of correspondences compared to applying the affine region detectors directly to the unfiltered images, and the average number of max-tree nodes is reduced by a factor greater than 3. Therefore, we can conclude that extinction filters are better than attribute filters with respect to preserving the number of correspondences found by affine detectors, while simplifying the max-tree structure. The use of extinction filters as a pre-processing step is recommended to accelerate image recognition tasks.