Multi-Phase Texture Segmentation Using Gabor Features Histograms Based on Wasserstein Distance

Abstract

We present a multi-phase image segmentation method based on the histogram of the Gabor feature space, which consists of a set of Gabor-filter responses with various orientations, scales and frequencies. Our model replaces the error function term in the original fuzzy region competition model with squared 2-Wasserstein distance function, which is a metric to measure the distance of two histograms. The energy functional is minimized by alternative minimization method and the existence of closed-form solutions is guaranteed when the exponent of the fuzzy membership term being 1 or 2. We test our model on both simple synthetic texture images and complex natural images with two or more phases. Experimental results are shown and compared to other recent results.