Fast extraction of multi-resolution Gabor features

Jarmo Ilonen, Joni-Kristian Kamarainen, Heikki Kälviäinen

Abstract: Gabor filter responses are general purpose features for computer vision and image processing and have been very successful in many application areas, for example in bio- metric authentication (fingerprint matching, face detection, face recognition and iris recognition). In a typical feature construction, filters are utilised as a multi-resolution structure of several filters tuned to different frequencies and orientations. The multi-resolution structure is similar to wavelets, but the non-orthogonality of Gabor functions implies the main weakness: computational heaviness. The high computational complexity prevents their use in many real-time or near real-time tasks. In this study, an efficient sequential computation method for multi-resolution Gabor features is presented.