Unsupervised Texture Segmentation Using Gabor

Filters1
Ani1 K. Jain Farshid Farrokhnia
Department of Computer Science Department of Electrical Engineering
Michigan State University Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027, U.S.A. East Lansing, MI 48824-1226, U.S.A.
[email protected] [email protected]

The multi-channel filtering approach to texture analysis is in-

Abstract
tuitively appealing because the dominant spatial-frequency com-
We presenf a texture segmentation algorithm inspired by ponents of different textures are different. An important advantage
the multi-channel filtering theory for visual information pro- of the multi-channel filtering approach to texture analysis is that
cessing in the early stages of human visual system. The one can use simple statistics of gray values in the filtered images as
channels are characterized by a bank of Gabor filters that texture features. This simplicity is the direct result of decomposing
nearly uniformly covers the spatial-frequency domain. We i
the original image into several filtered images with limited spec-
propose a systematic filter selection scheme which is based
on reconstructionof the input image from the filtered images. tral information. The main issues involved in the multi-channel
Texture features are obtained by subjecting each (selected) filtering approach to texture analysis are: 1) functional character-
filtered image to a nonlinear transformation and computing ization of the channels and the number of channels, 2) extraction
a measure of “energy” in a window around each pixel. An of appropriate texture features from the filtered images. 3) the re-
unsupervised square-emr clustering algorithm is then used lationship between channels (dependent vs. independent), and 4)
to integrate the feature images and produce a segmentation. integration of texture features from different channels to produce
A simple procedure to incorporate spatial adjacency infor- a segmentation. Different multi-channel filtering techniques that
mation in the clustering process is also proposed. We report are proposed in the literature differ in their approach to one or
experiments on images with natural textures as well as arti- more of the above issues.
ficial textures with identical 2nd- and 3rd-order statistics. We use a bank of Gabor filters to characterize the chan-
nels. We show that the filter set forms an approximate basis for
a wavelet transform, with the Gabor function as the wavelet. We
1 Introduction propose a systematic filter selection scheme which is based on
reconstruction of the input image from the filtered images. Each
Image segmentation is a difficult yet very important task in many
(selected) filtered image is subjected to a bounded nonlinear trans-
image analysis or computer vision applications. Differences in
formation that behaves as a ‘blob detector’. The combination of
the mean gray level or in color in small neighborhoods alone axe
multi-channel filtering and the nonlinear stages can be viewed as
not always sufficient for image segmentation. Rather, one has
performing a multi-scale blob detection. Texture discrimination
to rely on differences in the spatial arrangement of gray values
is associated with differences in the attributes of these blobs in
of neighboring pixels - that is, on differences in texture. The
different regions. A statistical approach is then used where the
problem of segmenting an image based on textural cues is referred
attributes of the blobs are captured by texture features defined by
to as texture segmentation problem.
a measure of “energy” in a small window around each pixel in
The diversity of natural and artificial textures makes it im-
each response image. This process generates one ‘feature image’
possible to give a universal definition of texture. A large number
corresponding to each filtered image (see Figure 1). The size of
of techniques for analyzing image texture has been proposed in
the past two decades [ l l , 221. In this paper, we focus on a par-
the window for each response image is determined using a simple ,
formula involving the radial frequency to which the correspond-
ticular approach to texture analysis which is referred to as the
ing filter is tuned. A square-error clustering algorithm is then used
multi-channel filtering approach. This approach is inspired by a to identify the texture categories. A simple procedure for inclu-
multi-channel filtering theory for processing visual information in sion of contextual (spatial adjacency) information in the clustering
the early stages of the human visual system. First proposed by process is also proposed.
Campbell & Robson [4], the theory holds that the visual system
decomposes the retinal image into a number of filtered images,
each of which contains intensity variations over a narrow range 2 Channel Characterization
of frequency (size) and orientation. The psychophysical experi-
We represent the channels with a bank of two-dimensional Gabor
ments that suggested such a decomposition used various grating
filters. A two-dimensional Gabor function consists of a sinusoidal
pattems as stimuli and were based on adaptation techniques [4].
plane wave of some frequency and orientation, modulated by a
Subsequent psychophysiological experiments provided additional
two-dimensional Gaussian envelope. A ‘canonical’ Gabor filter in
evidence supporting the theory [lo].
the spatial domain is given by
‘This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation
and by a grant from E.I. Du Pont De Nemours
infrastructure grant CDA-8806599,
& Company Inc.
9OCH2930-6~/000(M014$01.W0 1990 IEEE
 r]
Input Image

Bank of Gabor Filters

(l
.. . Filtered
Images

Nonlinearitv

Local 'Energy' Computation

Square-Error Clustering
I Figure 2: (a) An even-symmetricGabor filter in the spatial do-
main. (b) Corresponding MTF. The origin is at ( r ,c ) = (32,32).
Segmented Image

scrated their potential for texture discrimination. Similarly, Perry

Figure 1: An overview of the texture segmentation algorithm. & Lowe 1191 use a fixed set of Gabor filters in their texture seg-
mentation algorithm. Bovik et at. 111 have used complex Gabor
filters, where the real part of each filter is an even-symmetric Ga-
bor filter (i.e., 4 = 0) and the imaginary part is an odd-symmetric
where uo and q5 are the frequency and phase of the sinusoidal plane
Gabor filter (i.e., 4 = n/2). Instead of using a fixed set of filters,
wave along the z-axis (i.e. the 0" orientation), and uz and uy are
Bovik er al. apply a simple peak finding algorithm to the power
the space constants of the Gaussian envelope along the z- and
spectrum of the image in order to determine the radial frequen-
y-axis, respectively. A Gabor filter with arbitrary orientation, 00,
cies of the appropriate Gabor filters. In our texture segmentation
can be obtained via a rigid rotation of the I-y coordinate system.
algorithm, we model the channels with afued set of Gabor filters
These two-dimensional functions have been shown to be good fits
that preserve almost all the information in the input image.
to the receptive field profiles of simple cells in the striate cortex
[18,71.
The frequency- and orientation-selective properties of a Gabor 2.1 Choice of Filter Parameters
filter are more explicit in its frequency domain representation.
We implement each Gabor filter as a discrete realization of the
With 4 = 0, the Fourier transform of the Gabor function in (1) is
MTF in (2). We use four values of orientation 00: O", 45", go",
real-valued and given by
and 135". For an image array with a width of N, pixels, where
N , is a power of 2, the following values of radial frequency u o
are used:

where uu = l/2iruz, U, = l/2iruy, and A = 2xu,u,. The Fourier

domain representation in (2) specifies the amount by which the fil- Note that the radial frequencies are 1 octave apart. (The frequency
ter modifies or modulates each frequency component of the input bandwidth, in octaves, from frequency f l to frequency fi is given
image. Such representations are, therefore, referred to as modula- by log,(f2/fl).) We let the orientation and frequency bandwidths
tion transfer functions (MTF). Figure 2 shows an even-symmetric of each filter be 45" and 1 octave, respectively. Several experi-
Gabor filter and its MTF in a 64 x 64 array. ments have shown that the frequency bandwidth of simple cells
Texture segmentation requires simultaneous measurements in in the visual cortex is about 1 Octave [20]. Psychophysical exper-
both the spatial and the spatial-frequency domains. Filters with iments show that the resolution of the orientation tuning ability of
smaller bandwidths in the spatial-frequency domain are more de- the human visual system is as high as 5 degrees. Therefore, in
sirable because they allows us to make finer distinctions among general, finer quantization of orientation will be needed. The re-
different textures. On the other hand, accurate localization of striction to four orientations is made for computational efficiency.
texture boundaries requires filters that are localized in the spatial The above choice of the radial frequencies, guarantees that
domain. However, the effective width of a filter in the spatial the passband of the filter with the highest radial frequency, viz.
domain and its bandwidth in the spatial-frequency domain are in- (NJ4)fi cycledimage-width, falls inside the image array. For
versely related. An important property of Gabor filters is that they an image with 256 columns, for example, a total of 28 filters
have optimal joint localization, or resolution, in both the spatial can be used - 4 orientations and 7 frequencies. Note that filters
and the spatial-frequency domains [8]. with very low radial frequencies (e.g., 1f i and 2 f i cycledimage-
The use of Gabor filters in texture analysis is not new. For width) can often be left out, because they capture spatial variations
example, Tumer [21] used a fixed set of Gabor filters and demon- that are too large to correspond to texture. To assure that the filters
 Figure 3: The filter set in the spatial-frequency domain
(256 x 256). There are a total of 28 Gabor filters. Only
the half-peak support of the filters are shown. The origin is at
(row,col) = (128,128).
Figure 4 Examples of filtered images for 055-068 texture pair
(128x256). (a) Input image. @e) Filtered images corresponding
do not respond to regions with constant intensity, we have set the to Gabor filters tuned to 16 fich-w and to 0°,450,W O , and135O.
MTF of each filter at (u,o) = (0,O)to zero. As a result each respectively.
filtered image has a zero mean.
The set of filters used in our algorithm results in nearly uni- where
form coverage of the frequency domain (Figure 3). This filter SSTOT = C s ( ~ , y ) ~ .
Z,Y
set constitutes an approximate basis for a wavelet transform, with
the Gabor filter as the wavelet. The wavelet transform is closel) Note that s(z,y) has a mean of zero, since the mean gray value
related to the window Fourier transform. However, unlike win- of each filtered image is zero.
dow Fourier transforms where the window is fixed, in a wavelet For computational efficiency, we determine the “best” subset
transform the window size is allowed to change according to fre- 01 .he filtered images (filters) by the following suboptimal sequen-

quency [17]. Intuitively, a wavelet transform can be interpreted tial forward selection procedure:
as a band-pass filtering operation on the input image. The Gabor
1. Select the filtered image that best approximates s(z, y), i.e.
function is an admissible wavelet, however, it does not result in an
results in the highest value of R2.
orthogonal decomposition. This means that a wavelet transform
based on Gabor wavelets is redundant. A decomposition obtained 2. Select the next filtered image that together with previously
by our filter set is nearly orthogonal, as the amount of overlap selected filtered image(s) best approximate s(z,y).
between the filters (in the spatial-frequency domain) is small.
Figure 4 shows examples of filtered images for an image 3. Repeat Step 2 until R2 2 0.95.
containing ‘straw matting’ @55) and ‘wood grain’ (D68) textures
A minimum value of 0.95 for R2 means that we will use only as
from the photographic album of textures by Brodatz [2]. The abil-
many filtered images as necessary to account for at least 95% of
ity of the filters to exploit differences in spatial-frequency (size)
the intensity variations in s(z, y).
and orientation in the two textures is evident in these images. The
differences in the strength of the responses in regions with dif- Let r;(z,y) be the zth filtered image and R,(u,v)be its Dis-
ferent textures is the key to the multi-channel approach to texture crete Fourier Transform. The amount of overlap between the
analysis. To maximize visibility, each filtered image has been MTFs of the Gabor filters in our filter set is small. Therefore,
scaled to full contrast. the total energy E in S ( I , y ) can be approximated by
n
E R ~ E ; ,
2.2 Filter Selection i= 1

Using only a subset of the filtered images can reduce the com- where
putational burden at later stages, because this directly translates
Ei = [ ~ i ( z ? y )=] ~ (R,(U,V)~~.
into a reduction in the number of texture features. Let s(z,y ) be Z,Y u,u
the reconstruction of the input image obtained by adding all the Now, it is easily verified that for any subset A of filtered images
filtered images. Let .^(z,y) be the partial reconstruction of the
image obtained by adding a given subset of filtered images. The
e m r involved in using S(z,y) instead of s(z, y ) can be measured
by
An approximate filter selection would then consists of computing
SSE = C
Z,Y
[S^(X,Y) - 4 x 1 Y)12
E; for z = 1,. . . ,n. These energies can be computed in the Fourier
The fraction of intensity variations in s(z,y) that is explained by domain, hence avoiding unnecessary inverse Fourier transforms.
S^(z,y) can be measured by the coefficient of determination We then sort the filters (channels) based on their energy and pick
as many filters as needed to achieve R2 2 0.95. Computationally,
SSE this procedure is much more efficient than the sequential forward
R2=1--
SSTOT’ selection procedure described before.
16
 small numerical ranges by those with larger ranges.
3 Computing Feature Images Clustering a large number of pattems becomes computation-
ally demanding. Therefore, we first cluster a small randomly se-
We use the following procedure to compute features from each lected subset of pattems into a specified number of clusters. Pat-
filtered image. First, each filtered image is subjected to a non-
rems in each cluster are given a generic category label that distin-
linear transformation. Specifically, we use the following bounded
guishes them from those in other clusters. These labeled panems
nonlinearity are then used as training patterns to classify pattems (pixels) in
1-
Q(4= tanh((Yt) = -7 (3) the entire image using a minimum distance classifier.
In texture segmentation, neighboring pixels are very likely
where (Y is a constant. This nonlinearity bears certain similari- to belong to the same texture category. We propose a simple
ties to the sigmoidal activation function used in artificial neural method that incorporates the spatial adjacency information directly
networks. In our experiments, we have used an empirical value in the clustering process. This is achieved by including the spatial
of (Y = 0.25 which results in a rapidly saturating, threshold-like coordinates of the pixels as two additional features.
transformation. As a result, the application of the nonlinearity
transforms the sinusoidal modulations in the filtered images to
square modulations and, therefore, can be interpreted as a blob 5 Experimental Results
detector. However, the detected blobs are not binary, and unlike
the blobs detected by Voorhees & Poggio [23] they are not nec- We now apply our texture segmentation algorithm to several im-
essarily isolated from each other. Also, since each filtered image ages in order to demonstrate its performance. These images are
has a zero mean and the nonlinearity in (3) is odd-symmetric, both created by collaging subimages of natural as well as artificial tex-
dark and light blobs are detected. tures. We start by a total of 20 Gabor filters in each case. Each
Instead of identifying individual blobs and measuring their at- filter is tuned to one of the four orientations and to one of the five
tributes, we simply compute the average absolute deviation (AAD) highest radial frequencies. For an image with a width of 256 pix-
from the mean in small overlapping windows. This is similar to els, for example, 4fi, 8d?, 16fi,32fi, and 64fi cycleshmage-
the ‘texture energy’ measure that was first proposed by Laws [15]. width radial frequencies are used. We then use our filter selection
Formally, the feature image ek(z, y) corresponding to filtered im- scheme to determine a subset of filtered images that achieves an
age ~ is given
y )( i, by

where $(.) is the nonlinear function in (3) and W,, is an M x M

window centered at the pixel with coordinates (z, y).
The size, M , of the averaging window in (4)is an important (a) (b)
parameter. More reliable measurement of texture features calls for
Figure 5: (a) 055-068 texture pair. (b) Two-category segmen-
larger window sizes. On the other hand, more accurate localiza- tation obtained using a total of 13 Gabor filters.
tion of region boundaries calls for smaller windows. Furthermore,
using Gaussian weighted windows, rather than unweighted win-
dows, is likely to result in more accurate localization of texture
boundaries. For each filtered image we use a Gaussian window
whose space constant U is proportional to the average size of the
intensity variations in the image. For a Gabor filter with radial
frequency uo this average size is given by

T = N,/uo pixels, (5)

where N , is the width (number of columns) of the image. We

found a n NN 0.52’ to be appropriate in most of our segmentation
experiments.

4 Integrating Feature Images

Having obtained the feature images, the main question is how to
integrate features corresponding to different filters to produce a
segmentation. Let’s assume that there are K texture categories,
CI,. . . ,CK,present in the image. If our texture features are capa-
ble of discriminating these categories then the patterns belonging
to each category will form a cluster in the feature space which
is “compact” and “isolated” from clusters corresponding to other
texture categories. Pattern clustering algorithms are ideal vehicles
for recovering such clusters in the feature space. In our texture (b) (c)
segmentation experiments we use a square-error clustering algo- Figure 6: (a) A 256 x 256 image containing four different Gaus-
rithm known as CLUSTER [13]. Prior to clustering each feature sian Markov random field textures. (b) Four-category segmen-
is normalized to have a zero mean and a constant variance. This tation obtained using a total of 11 Gabor filters. (c) Same as b,
normalization is intended to avoid the domination of features with but with pixel coordinates used as additional features.
17
 R2 value of at least 0.95. The number of randomly selected fea-
ture vectors, that are used as input to the clustering program, is
proportional to the size of the input image. For a 256 x 256 im-
age, for example, 4000 pattems are selected at random, which is
about 6% of the total number of pattems. The same percentage is
used in all the following experiments. The segmentation results
are displayed as gray-level images, where regions belonging to
different categories are shown with different gray levels.
Figure 5 shows the segmentation results for the 055-068
texture pair. The algorithm successfully discriminates the two
textured regions and detects the boundary between them quite ac-
curately. The segmentation with pixel coordinates included as
additional features was essentially the same for this example. (a) (b)
Figure 6 (a) shows a 256 x 256 image containing four dif- Figure 7: (a) A 256 x 256 image containing five natural textures
ferent Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) textures generated (D77, D55, D84, D17, and D24) from the Bmdatz album. @)
using non-causal finite lattice models [5]. These four textures can Five-category segmentation obtained using a total of 13 Gabor
not be discriminated based on their mean gray values. The four- filters and the pixel coordinates.
category segmentation of the image is shown in Figure 6 (b). The
segmentation improves considerably when pixel coordinates are
used as additional features (Figure 6 (c)).
Figure 7 (a) shows another 256 x 256 image containing natural
textures D77, D55, D84, D17, and D24 from the Brodatz album.
The five-category segmentation of this image, using 13 Gabor
filters and the pixel coordinates, is shown in Figure 7 (b).
Figure 8 (a) shows a 512 x 512 image containing sixteen
natural textures, also from the Brodatz album. Our filter selection
(with a threshold of 0.95 for R 2 ) indicated that only 14 filtered
images are sufficient. However, the resulting segmentation was not
very good. Using all 20 filtered images (and the pixel coordinates)
we obtained the 16-category segmentation in Figure 8 (b). Recall
that the fitting criterion in our filter selection scheme is computed (a) (b)
globally over the entire image. A larger threshold for R2 should,
Figure 8: (a) A 512 x 512 image containing sixteen natural
therefore, be used when one or more texture. categories occupy a
textures (D29, D12, D17, D55; D32, D5, D84, D68; D77, D24.
small fraction of the image. D9, D4; D3, D33, D51, D54) from the Brodatz album @) 16-
Figure 9 shows the segmentation of a number of texture pair categoly segmentation obtained using a total of 20 Gabor filters
images that have been used in the psychophysical studies of tex- and the pixel coordinates.
ture perception [13]. The two textures in the ‘L-and-+’ texture
pair have identical power spectra. The textures in the ‘even-odd’

++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++
+ + + + + L L L L L L + + + + +
+ + + + + L L L L L L + + + + +
+ + + + + L L L L L L + + + + +
+ + + + + L L L L L L + + + + +
+ + + + + L L L L L L + + + + +
+ + + + + L L L L L L + + + + +
++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++

(a) (b) (c) (dl

Figure 9: Segmentation of texture pairs that have been used in the psychophysical studies of texture perception. All images are
256 x 256. The number of Gabor filters used varied between 8 - 11. (a) ‘Land-+’. (b) ‘even-odd’. (c) ‘triangle-arrow’ (d)
‘S-IO’.
18
 tion using our region-based texture segmentanorl algorithm. Then,
based on the “evidence” for an edge provided by the edge-based
segmentation, one can test the validity of boundaries between re-
gions in the oversegmented solution. This integrated approach is
currently being investigated.

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19