CIRCULAR HARMONIC FUNCTIONS: A UNIFYING MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK
FOR IMAGE RESTORATION, ENHANCEMENT, INDEXING, RETRIEVAL AND
RECOGNITION
Alessandro Neri
University of Roma TRE, Applied Electronics Department
Via della vasca navale, 84. 00146 Roma, Italy
Email: neri@uniroma3.it
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a review of the main properties of the
Gauss-Laguerre Circular Harmonic Functions (CHF) particu-
larly useful in image processing applications like restoration
enhancement, recognition and retrieval. In fact, adoption of
representations based on this family of functions, allows to re-
duce the computational complexity of Bayesian detectors and
estimators. Applications to restoration and image retrieval are
also discussed.
Index Terms— Gauss-Laguerre Circular harmonic Func-
tions, Image retrieval, Image indexing
1. INTRODUCTION
Ability to efficiently co-create and share electronic media
contents represents one major challenge of future internet.
To fulfill user expectations while avoiding Digital Divide 2.0
effects, induced by the inability to employ the new technolo-
gies, low cost, simple to use, possibly automatic solutions for
all those basic operations like image and video acquisition,
restoration, enhancement, indexing and retrieval, involved in
the Networked Electronic Media chain have to be deployed
in the mid term. However, computational and storage com-
plexities can be efficiently faced whenever we are able to
employ an unified mathematical framework for representing
the image and video contents and fulfill the above mentioned
tasks. Thus, this contribution explores the potentialities of
hyper-complete image and video representations based on
Circular Harmonic Functions (CHFS), [1], [2]. These kinds
of representations that are directly related to the Fouriers se-
ries expansion of images when represented in a polar domain,
in addition to many relevant mathematical properties, have
the property of including in the basis set elements like edges,
lines and corners, particularly relevant for the human visual
system. Thus their adoption can reduce the effort paid by
the user in taking control of the technology still assuring the
This work has been partially funded by the Radiolabs Consortium and
the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni.
978-1-4244-7287-1/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
optimality of the devised solutions. In particular the subject
of the paper will be the review of the mathematical properties
of the Gauss-Laguerre CHFs, including the Dyadic Wavelets
that can be constructed starting from them, and some of the
main applications that have been recently realized by the
author and his collaborators in the fields of image restora-
tion and enhancement, [3],[4], edge extraction, [5],[6],[7],
object recognition, [8], key points extraction, [9], and image
indexing and retrieval, [10].
2. THE GAUSS-LAGUERRE TRANSFORM
Let x = [ x y ]T denote the cartesian coordinates of a point
of the image plane R2 , and [ ρ θ ]T the corresponding polar
coordinates. Then, given an image f (x) ∈ L2 ("2 , d2 x), let
fp (r,θ ) = f (ξ1 + r cos θ,ξ 2 + r sin θ) be its representation
around the point ξ = (ξ1 , ξ2 ) in polar coordinate space. Since
fp is periodic w.r.t. θ, it can be decomposed into a Fourier
series: !
fp (r,θ ) = hn (r)ejnθ ,
n
"2π
1
hn (r) = fp (r,θ )e−jnθ dθ, (1)
2π
0
where (1) is the radial profile corresponding to the n-th cir-
cular harmonic of f . We observe that every term of the series
is a Circular Harmonic Function, CHF, i.e., a bi-dimensional
polar separable function ψn of the kind:
# $
ψ rejθ = ψn (r,θ ) = hn (r) ejnθ .
The harmonic angular shape of ψn implies that it can be
steered in any direction φ by simple multiplication by the
complex factor e−jnφ , i.e., it is self-steerable, [11],[12]. In
fact
fp (r,θ − φ) = hn (r)ejnθ e−jnφ .
By virtue of their harmonic angular shape, CHFs are in-
deed natural detectors for different classes of features: CHFs
269 EUVIP2010
of order n=1 for example are tuned to edges, n = 2 to lines, n with
M - '
! (-2
= 3 to forks, etc.. -
- x − ξk --
Then, any image f ∈ L2 (") admits an orthogonal expan- γ = min -w - ,
x sk
2 m=1
sion under a Gaussian weighting function, V (r) = e−πr ,
and
complete over the entire plane, around a point ξ = (ξ1 , ξ2 ), M " - '
! (-2
in terms of any isotropically scaled version of the set of or-
-
- x − ξk --
Γ= -w - dx.
thogonal Laguerre Gauss CHFs Lnk (ρ,θ ) defined as, [13]: m=1 Isk
The above property implies that the inner product between
% &1/2 two images f and g with expansion coefficients Dkn (ξm ) and
k! Ckn (ξm ), respectively, satisfies the following condition:
Lnk (r,θ ) = (−1)k 2(|n|+1)/2 π |n|/2
(|n| + k)!
γ 1 !!! n
'f (x), g(x)( ≤ Dk (ξm ) C̄kn (ξm ) ≤ 'f (x), g(x)(
|n| 2
r|n| Lk (2πr2 )e−πr ejnθ , (2) Γ Γ m n
k

where are the generalized Laguerre polynomials defined

Lnk where the overbar denotes the complex conjugate. The mag-
by the Rodrigues formula, [14]: nitude of the approximation error strictly depends on the ratio
γ/Γ, that can be a priori computed.
!k ' ( h −n t k In addition, it can be demonstrated that the following
n+k t t e ∂
Lnk (t) = (−1)h = k
(tk+n e−t ). property holds, [15], [4].
k − h h! k! ∂t
h=0 PROPERTY II. Every Gauss-Laguerre function of the n-
(n)
Using this basis the local expansion of f (x) around the th order Lk with n > 0 generates a dyadic Circular Har-
point ξ = (ξ1 , ξ2 ) is: monic Wavelet (CHW).
This means that every image f (x) can be represented by
' ( !! ' ( its continuos wavelet transform W
x−ξ |x − ξ| (n) [f ](b, α,σ ) where b, α
Lk
f (x)V = fˆkn (ξ, σ)Lnk , θ(x − ξ) ,
σ σ and σ are the parameters characterising the translated, rotated
n k (n)
(3) and scaled version of the mother wavelet Lk (x).
2
where V (ρ) = e−πρ is the Gaussian weighting window and It can be demonstrated that the self-steering property
σ is the spreading factor. In literature, the set of coefficients holds even for the LGT coefficients. Let us denote with
ˆ
fk are referred to as the Laguerre Gauss Transform (LGT) of
n ˆ
f n
(x0 , σ) the LGT expansion of f (x) rotated by an angle α
α k

f (·) and are obtained from the latter by projection onto the around x 0 . Then the following property holds:
LG basis: fˆn (x0 , σ) = e−jnα fˆkn (x0 , σ). (5)
α k
) ' ( ' (*
x − ξ 1 |x − ξ|
fˆkn (ξ, σ) = f (x) V , Lnk , θ (x − ξ) . In addition, as shown in [4], the LGT coefficients a fˆkn of
σ σ σ the scaled-windowed function f (Sa (x)) V (Sa (x/σ)) can be
directly computed as a linear combination of the LGT coeffi-
The set {fˆkn (ξ, σ), k = 0, 1, 2, ...} describes the local behav-
cients fˆkn of the unscaled windowed function f (x)V (x/σ):
ior of the n-th angular harmonic of the image. Consequently,
∞
for edges, lines, forks and crosses, the greatest part of the a ˆn
!
energy is respectively focused on the first, second, third and f k = B(a, n, k, l)fˆln , (6)
fourth harmonic. l=k

With reference to localization of complicated patterns, a where

rather relevant property is the following, [10]. . ' (l−k
PROPERTY I. Given an image f defined over a finite sup- l−k (n + l)!l! a−n−2k 1
B(a, n, k, l) = (−1) 1− 2 .
port I ⊂ "2 , a lattice Ξ = {ξm ∈ I, m = 1, ..., M }, and a (n + k)!k! (l − k)! a
set of scale factors {s1 , s2 , ..., sL }, the set of Gauss-Laguerre (7)
functions Relations (6, 5) can be folded in a unique expression, which
+ ' ( , collects the transformations of the LGT coefficients induced
1 (n) |x − ξm | by the action of rotation and scaling on the original function.
L , θ(x − ξm ) , m = 1, ..., M (4)
sk k sk Thus, denoting with aα fˆkn the LGT coefficients of the image
rotated by an angle α and scaled by a factor a, we have:
defines a Riesz basis for f . ∞
!
In particular, a ˆn
B(a, n, k, l)fˆln e−jnα . (8)
α fk =
!!! l=k
γ%f (x)%2 ≤ |fˆkn (ξm , sk ) |2 ≤ Γ%f (x)%2 ,
m n k
For the demonstration details we refer to [4].

270
 3. RESTORATION AND ENHANCEMENT

Let {s1 , s2 , ..., sL } be a finite set of scale factors correspond-

ing to increasing resolutions. The set of complex images

zsk [b] = WL(1) [f ](b, α, sk ), k = 1, 2, ..., L (9)

0

yields the wavelet representation of f (x) in the multiscale

complex edge feature domain. Since the Fourier transform
(1)
of L0 is null in the origin, the recovery of f (x) may be
unstable when using a finite range of scales. Therefore, its (a) Original image (b) Enhanced image
reconstruction will also be based on a coarse approximation
obtained by a low pass zero order CHF filtering of the original Fig. 1. Original and enhanced image with γ1 = 1.2 and γ2 =
image. γ3 = γ4 = 0.9.
Let us denote with Hsk (ω) the frequency response of the
(1)
filter L0 and with H (0) (ω) the frequency response of the
(0)
filter L0 . Since, as demonstrated in [15] the Laguerre-Gauss and the enhancement concerns only the magnitude of the
CHWs, when ω 1 > 0, ω2 > 0, satisfy the stability condition complex edge image zsk (x). It is important to underline that
the unconditional enhancement of an image will amplify also
L
! the noise components thus resulting in non natural images.
2
0<A≤ |Hsk (ω)| ≤ B < ∞ , (10) To avoid this problem we propose to selectively sharpen the
k=1 edges on the basis of a restoration procedure inspired to the
given the coarse image approximation human visual system, and described below.
' ( When the observed image is affected by noise, restora-
1 (0) |x| tion may be substantially simplified by removing stochastic
fs0 (x) = f (x) ∗ L0 , θ(x) (11)
sk sk interaction between samples. As a matter of fact, spatial cor-
relation of edges is generally quite lower than correlation of
and the complex edge images
the original image. Therefore, detection and estimation can
% ' (&
1 (0) |x| be effectively performed by acting on the complex edge im-
zsk (x) = f (x) ∗ 1 − L0 , θ(x) ∗ ages zsk (x). At this aim, based on experimental evidence, we
s0 s0
' ( adopt for the first order statistics of zsk (x) a rather general
1 (1) |x| model constituted by a zero mean complex Gaussian mixture
L0 , θ(x) , (12)
sk sk with mixing parameters λki , i.e. a weighted sum of complex
with k = 1, 2, ..., L, the image f can be computed by means Gaussian distributions:
of the following expansion K
! 1 2
L
! pZ [zsk (x)] = λki N2 zsk (x), 0, RkZi (x) ,
f (x) = zsk (x) ∗ gsk (x) + fs0 (x), (13) i=1
k=1
where, z = [zR zI ]T denotes the 2D vector corresponding
where the reconstruction filters gsk (x) are defined in terms of to the complex number z = zR + jzI , N2 (z, µ, R) denotes
their Fourier transform as follows the Gaussian probability density function of a random bivari-
Hs∗k (ω) ate z with expectation µ and covariance matrix R. In addi-
Gsk (ω) = , k = 1, 2, . . . , L. (14) tion, we model the p.d.f. of the random variate ∆zsk (x), rep-
/
L
2
|Hsk (ω)| resenting the noise projection in the complex edge domain, as
k=1
a zero mean complex Gaussian mixture with mixing parame-
However we can enhance f (x) by selectively amplifying ters βjk , and covariance matrix RNk
j
(x).
the higher scales expansion coefficients. Formally, the en- Applying Bayes rule, the conditional expectation ẑsk of
hanced version f0(x) of f (x) is computed as follows: the complex edge image given the observation zsk is
L !! 1 2
! ẑsk (x) = wij zsk (x) RkZi (x)
f0(x) = z̃sk (x) ∗ gsk (x) + ys0 (x), (15)
j i
k=1

where 3 4−1
z̃sk (x) = γk zsk (x), (16) × RkNj (x) + RkZi (x) zsk (x), (17)

271
where where θ(x) is the phase of zsk (x).
By fact, the adaptive procedure acts as a surround inhibi-
βjk λki N2 [zsk , 0, RN
k
(x) + RkZi (x)]
wij [zsk (x)] = / / k k j
. tion terms that takes into account the context influence of the
k (x) + Rk (x)]
βj λi N2 [zsk , 0, RN j Zi surroundings of each point. The inhibition is large in textured
j j
areas, and small on flat regions thus leading to heaviest noise
Application of (17) requires the knowledge of the local suppression inside textures while sharpening contours. We
noise statistics. Considering that the complex edge image is observe that this inhibition has been also observed in the hu-
essentially a sample of a sparse random field, a simple Gaus- man visual system, being originated from the regions flanking
sian distribution can be successfully applied. Inspired to both the receptive field of an orientation selective neuron on both
parametric CFAR detectors and psychophysical and neuro- sides of the optimal stimulus for that neuron. The width of
physiological findings, we compute the noise variance as the the central region excluded from the computation of the back-
local average of the energy of the weighted complex edge im- ground statistics is equal to the width of the spatial support of
age on a neighbor of the current site. To avoid self masking the complex edge wavelet operator. By varying a, the inhibi-
the noise variance is set to the minimum of the average of the tion term can partially or completely suppress the sharpening
L2 norms of the complex edges computed on the sets given of textured areas.
by two half rings with centre in the current site and oriented With respect to the identification of the edge statistical
along the edge direction, with the exclusion of a narrow strip model we observe that object contours usually consist of long
of width 2a oriented along the edge, as illustrated in Fig. 2. and wide connected components of nonzero pixels, while tex-
ture edges, especially after surround inhibition, lead to rel-
atively short and thin components. Thus to build the con-
tour map we apply edge thinning by non-maxima suppres-
sion and binarization by thresholding. Specifically, we apply
to |ẑsk (x)| non-maxima suppression. Let usk (x) be the unit
vector parallel to ẑsk (x) and Ssk the set of all points which
are local maxima of |ẑsk (x)| in the direction of usk (x):
+ - ,
- ∂ |ẑsk (x)| ∂ |ẑsk (x)|
Ssk = x -- =0 ∧ <0
∂usk ∂usk
Fig. 2. CFAR sets for background activity estimation.
Let us partition the set Ssk into Nc connected subsets
At this aim, we define two weighting functions ws+k ,φ (x) Cl
(sk )
, so that
and ws−k ,φ (x):
N
9 C :
(sk ) (s ) (sk )
DoG± S sk = Cl , Ch k Cl =∅
s ,φ (x)
ws±k ,φ (x) = // k ± , (18) l=1 h$=l
DoGsk ,φ (x)
n m (s )
A morphological dilation is then applied to Cl k , with a 3×3
where DoG±
sk ,φ (x) is obtained as:
(s )
square structuring element q3 , yielding a dilated subset Dl k :
DoGsk (x) · U−1 [± (x1 cos φ + x2 sin φ − a)] , (19) Dl
(sk )
= Cl
(sk )
⊕ q3 .
where U−1 is the step function defined as follows: (sk )
Then, we define as global contour weight G of Cl , the sum
+ (s )
0, η< 0 of the values of |ẑsk (x)| over Dl k :
U−1 (η) = , (20)
1, η ≥ 0 6 7 !
(s )
G Cl k = |ẑsk [n, m]|.
and DoG(x) is the difference of two concentric Gaussian (s )
[n,m]∈Dl k
functions:
- 1 2 1 2-+ Finally a binary edge map Bsk is computed by thresholding
DoGσ [x] = -N2 x, 0, σ 2 I − N2 x, 0, l2 σ 2 I - , (21) the global contour weight map, i.e.,
where |η|+ = ηU−1 (η) denotes half-wave rectification. 9 (s )
B sk = Cl k
Then, we estimate the noise covariance matrix as follows: ! "
(s )
G Cl k >Gmin
RN (x) =
56 7 6 78 An example of this edge detection procedure in presence
2 2
α min |zsk (x)| ∗ ws+k ,θ (x) , |zsk (x)| ∗ ws−k ,θ (x) I. of heavy noise is illustrated in Fig. 3.

272

(a) Noisy input image SNR=13 dB (b) Extracted edges
Fig. 3. Edge extraction in presence of noise.
To restore an image affected by additive white Gaussian
noise, the image is filtered with a bank of Gauss-Laguerre
filters and decomposed at different scales. The single scale
complex edge image resulting from the wavelet filter passes
through the adaptive MMSE complex edge estimator that lo-
cally estimates the noise variance producing surround inhibi-
tion where highly textured areas are suppressed. The estimate
is further processed in the binarization block, where a binary
contour map is created, as previously described. At this point,
the iterative denoising process takes place. At each iteration,
to compute the observation noise variance the sites belong-
ing to the binary contour map are excluded. Moreover, these
sited are used to refine the edge statistics. An example of the
denoising procedure is shown in Fig.4.
(a) Noisy image (b) Restored image
Fig. 4. Noisy and restored image.
3.1. 3D image enhancement
The great popularity gained by 3D Hollywood productions,
the imminent introduction into the consumer market of 3D
TV sets announced by the major manufacturers as well as
the 3D sports broadcasting that will enter into service with
the 2010 FIFA world Cup, focus our attention on 3D image
and video enhancement. In principle each frame of a stereo
pair could be separately processed, but relevant benefits can
be gained when the existing correlation is considered. With
273
respect to restoration and enhancement, this correlation can
be summarized by the disparity map providing information
about the spatial relationships among objects and viewer and
the motion field that accounts for the temporal evolution.
Extraction from a stereo pair or a stereo video of the dis-
parity map and the motion field can benefit of the adoption
of a Gauss-Laguerre representation. In fact, as illustrated in
the next section, in this way the implementation of the Maxi-
mum Likelihood pattern location and rotation estimators can
be drastically simplified from a computational point of view.
Nevertheless, in this section we focus our attention on the
visual enhancements that can be introduced when the char-
acteristics of the human visual system are combined with the
possibility of locally controlling the spatial bandwidth of the
reconstruction operator by acting on the γk factors of (16),
[17] .
In fact, as stated by the principle of ”Organization of
space”, well known to painters and well exemplified by many
paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, like the famous “Mona Lisa”,
foreground figures possess well-defined contours, while ob-
jects in the background appear more and more blurred while
their distance increases. In addition this effect increases in
presence of moving objects.
Visual appearance of 3D videos can be increased by
adopting an adaptive multi-resolution enhancement technique
[18] controlled by the disparity map providing the informa-
tion on objects’ distances from the observer point-of view
and, the motion field.
Without loss of generality let us assume that the stereo
pair has been eventually rectified in order to comply with a
simplified epipolar geometry characterized by an horizontal
epipolar line, so that the disparity d(x), i.e., the horizontal
displacement between the left and right images of a given ob-
ject, is proportional to the the object depth z(x).
In addition let t(x) be the motion field. The disparity map
and the motion field are then combined in order to control the
amount of enhancement performed over different regions of a
given frame pair. The discussion about the disparity map and
motion field estimation and related regularization algorithms
is beyond the scope of this paper. Here we assume that both
the disparity and the motion field have been eventually filtered
in order to remove outliers as well as meaningless details.
Let dmin and dmax respectively denote the minimum and
the maximum disparity for a given imaging geometry and
tmax the maximum motion vector compatible with the ex-
pected object dynamics. Then, the normalized disparity map
d(o) is defined as:
+ d(x)−dmin
(o)
d (x) = dmax −dmin , d(x) < dmax , (22)
1, d(x) ≥ dmax
Similarly, the normalized motion field t(o) is defined as:
+ t(x)
tmax , t(x) < tmax
t(o) (x) = , (23)
1, t(x) ≥ tmax
 Then we introduce the normalized enhancement factor
map e(o) (x)as the linear combining of d(o) (x) and t(o) (x),
namely,
e(o) (x) = α · [1 − d(o) (x)] + (1 − α) · [1 − t(o) (x)]. (24)
A greater enhancement factor is associated to those objects
which are the slowest, and closest to the observer. The pa-
rameters α controls the relevance of the objects’ spatial and
temporal behavior.
Therefore, Eqs. (15), (16) modify as follows
L
!
f0(x) = γk [e(o) (x)]zsk (x)gsk (x) + ys0 (x).
k=1
In our experiment the design of the relationship between
γk and e(o) (x) has been inspired to the relationships between
the signal bandwidth B and the link length L observed in op-
tical communications for which we have:
B0
B= , (26)
Lm
where 0.5 < m ≤ 1 depending on the light dispersion nature.
Thus the gain coefficients γ are selected in such a way
that the spatial bandwidth of the reconstruction filter is pro-
portional to [e(o) ]−m . At this aim, we observe that if a con-
stant set of gains γk is employed, the overall transfer function
is
L ther exploited in order to to reduce the search time of a given
! γk |Hsk (ω)|
2
Gtot (ω) = , k = 1, 2, . . . , L.
/
L
2 tection and estimation procedure that verifies whether each
k=1 |Hsk (ω)|
k=1
The corresponding bandwidth versus γ can then be easily
computed.
Two examples of the 3D image enhancement based on the
disparity map are illustrated in Fig. 5. Visual inspection con-
firms the larger spatial bandwidth associated to foreground
objects. For a proper setup of the parameters a subjective
video quality assessment has been performed at the Univer-
sity of Roma TRE, [17]. In addition to an overall preference
for the enhanced versions, the subjective tests indicated that
the best fitting of the Mean Opinion Score have been obtained
when α = 0.5, so that the same importance is attributed to
both factors.
4. PATTERN LOCALIZATION AND IMAGE
RETRIEVAL
Local expansions based on Gauss-Laguerre CHFs can be ef-
fectively employed for Maximum Likelihood orientation in-
variant pattern recognition, [4]. However, a rather large num-
ber of expansion terms is required when dealing with large
objects containing many details. To reduce the computational
complexity we may resort to the hyper-complete Riesz basis
(4) so that a region of interest can be partitioned into smaller
and smaller square blocks whose content is approximated by
a truncated expansion making use of just a few CHFs.
More in detail, at the first step the basis set is empty and
the current region R(0) is set equal to the given region of inter-
est (ROI). At the i-th step of the recursion, the center ξi of the
current region R(i) is evaluated and the subset of functions
+ ' ( ,
1 (n) |x − ξi |
L , θ(x − ξi ) , k = 1, ..., K, n = 1, ..., N
si k si
(25)
is considered as a potential candidate. Then the norm of the
corresponding approximation error on R(i) between the im-
age itself f (x) and the reconstructed image fˆ(x) using the
current candidate basis subset is computed, namely
-- ' ( --
-- x − ξi --
||∆f || = ----wT [f (x) − fˆ(x)]---- ,
δi
where δi denotes the width of R(i) , and wT (x) is a square
window of unitary width. If this norm exceeds a predefined
threshold the current region is split into four squares and
the quadtree decomposition is recursively applied to each of
them. Otherwise the current candidate subset is added to the
basis and the next region is considered.
The properties of the quadtree decomposition can be fur-
(27) pattern in a set of candidates images. In fact a sequential de-
candidate image contains each square of the quadtree can be
adopted. At this aim the template quadtree blocks can be
ranked on the basis of the incremental Fisher’s information on
pattern location, rotation and scale estimation. However, as
demonstrated in [4] this quantity is proportional to the magni-
tude of the energy of the derivatives along two orthogonal di-
rections and to the energy of the angular derivative, or, equiv-
alently, to the effective spatial and angular bandwidths.
Therefore, the template quadtree blocks are ranked on the
basis of the energy of the mid and high, angular and radial,
frequency components, computed directly from the Gauss La-
guerre expansion coefficients.
As an alternative, salient points based on invariants can
be extracted and quadtree blocks can then be ranked based on
the saliency of the key points falling inside them, [16].
When a ROI of a given image has to be searched in a
database, the first block of the ranked list is considered.
Due to the self steering property detection and localization
of the pattern belonging to the first block can be performed
by means of a quasi-Newton maximization procedure as the
Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno algorithm maximizing,
274
for each b the quantity of both [27] , those based on global search and regional search
[28], and to the method employed in SIMPLIcity. The per-
2 formance assessment indicates that the average percentage of
GLLF (1) (b, a,ϕ ) = − ×
N0 Γ recovered relevant images is greater than 0.96 while the other
-
K -
-2 methods attain at the maximum 0.87 (global search).
N !
! L
! -
- n −jnϕ -
-Dk (ξc ) − B(a; n, k, l)Ck (ξc − b)e
n
- ,
- -
n=0 k=0 l=0 5. CONCLUSIONS
where ξc denotes the center of the current region.
CHF based image representations constitute powerful tools
Thus, for each discrete location of a grid, the rotation and
for highly performant algorithms addressing a wide range of
the scale maximizing GLLF (1) are determined and then a
applications in the image processing domain, from restora-
discrete direct search is performed to determine its absolute
tion to image retrieval. Although the techniques illustrated in
maximum. Thus, at the first step the parameter estimate is
this contribution have been specified for the Gauss-Laguerre
+ 6 7, CHFs, they can be easily extend to other CHF families, like
(1) (1)
[b̂ , â , ϕ̂ ] = Arg max GLLF (b, a,ϕ ) .
(1) (1)
those based on Zernike’s polynomials.
b,a,ϕ

Once for each image of the dataset the local maximum of
GLLF (1) has been computed, the images are ranked on the
basis of this absolute maximum. Then the image correspond-
ing to the highest GLLF (1) is selected as the potential candi-
(1)
date for image matching, and [b̂ , â(1) , ϕ̂(1) ] is employed as
coarse estimate in order to verify whether the candidate image
contains the second block of the rank ordered list of quadtree
elements, too. Compared to the first block, the GLLF (2) map
is built only for a limited set of possible locations, falling in-
side a small neighbor of the site predicted on the basis of the
coarse estimates. In addition, the quasi-Newton maximization
of GLLF (2) is initialized using the coarse estimate too.
If the energy of the difference between the subset of the
reference template, constituted by the first and the second
square of the quadtree and the current image falls below a
predefine threshold, location and rotation of the image are re-
fined and the next square analyzed. In general, at the h-th
stage the GLLF (h) map is computed using the first h points
of the lattice, ranked according to the saliency indicator, i.e.,
h ! N !K
2 !
GLLF (h) [b, a,ϕ ] = − × Jan Jos, CA, USA, 2007.
N0 Γ m=1 n=0
k=0
- % ' (& -2
- L
! ξm − b -
- n n −jnϕ -
-Dk (ξm ) − B(a; n, k, l)Ck Rϕ e - .
- a - Article ID 71828, 28 pages, 2007
l=0
The procedure ends when the last block in the list has been
processed. If at some stage the energy of the difference ex-
ceeds a predefined threshold, the current image is discarded
and the next item of the dataset corresponding to the highest
GLLF (1) is considered as candidate for pattern matching.
Extensive retrieval experiments making use of quadtree
decomposition combined with Gauss-Laguerre CHFs, as well
as on Zernike’s CHF have been performed on the the Corel-
1000-A Database. The proposed technique has been com-
pared to conventional including those based on combination
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2007.

Fig. 5. Original and enhanced image.

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