Texture image retrieval based on log-Gabor features

Abstract

Since Daugman found out that the properties of Gabor filters match the early psychophysical features of simple receptive fields of the Human Visual System (HVS), they have been widely used to extract texture information from images for retrieval of image data. However, Gabor filters have not zero mean, which produces a non-uniform coverage of the Fourier domain. This distortion causes fairly poor pattern retrieval accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet efficient image retrieval approach based on a novel log-Gabor filter scheme. We make emphasis on the filter design to preserve the relationship with receptive fields and take advantage of their strong orientation selectivity. We provide an experimental evaluation of both Gabor and log-Gabor features using two metrics, the Kullback-Leibler (D KL) and the Jensen-Shannon divergence (D JS). The experiments with the USC-SIPI database confirm that our proposal shows better retrieval performance than the classic Gabor features. 3 © 2012 Springer-Verlag.