Local object description using Gabor features

Joni-Kristian Kamarainen (U. of Lappeenranta, Finland)
Recently, local object descriptors have been one of the most active research areas in computer vision. Their importance partly yields from the fact that structural variance in visual appearance of real objects and object categories can be efficiently modeled using a connected structure, spatial constellation, of local descriptors. Representing local visual information is also an intrinsic property of features constructed from Gabor filter responses; That was actually the original motivation in the first computer vision related publication of Gabor features in 1978 - claiming Gabor filter as "general image processing operator". This talk will cover the fundamentals of feature extraction using Gabor filters, fast implementations, important properties of Gabor features, and finally, demonstrate their use as local object descriptors.