OBJECT AND TEXTURE CLASSIFICATION USING HIGHER-ORDER STATISTICS

The problem addressed in this paper is the detection and classification of deterministic objects and random textures in a noisy scene. An energy detector is developed in the cumulant domain by exploiting the noise insensitivity of higher order statistics. An efficient implementation of this detector is described, using matched filtering. Its performance is analyzed using asymptotic distributions in a binary hypothesis-testing framework. The object and texture discriminant functions are minimum distance classifiers in the cumulant domain and can be efficiently implemented using a bank of matched filters. They are immune, to additive Gaussian noise and insensitive to object shifts. Important extensions, which can handle object rotation and scaling, are also discussed. An alternate texture classifier is derived from a ML viewpoint and is statistically efficient at the expense of complexity. The application of these algorithms to the texture-modeling problem is indicated, and consistent parameter estimates are obtained. Finally, simulations are shown for both the object and the texture classification problems.