Multiscale texture enhancement

The ideas of texture analysis by means of the structure tensor are combined with the scale-space concept of anisotropic diffusion filtering. In contrast to many other nonlinear diffusion techniques, the proposed one uses a diffusion tensor instead of a scalar diffusivity. This allows true anisotropic behaviour. The preferred diffusion direction is determined according to the phase angle of the structure tensor. The diffusivity in this direction is increasing with the local coherence of the signal. This filter is constructed in such a way that it gives a mathematically well-funded scale-space representation of the original image. Experiments demonstrate its usefulness for the processing of interrupted one-dimensional structures such as fingerprint and fabric images.