An orthonormal-shell-Fourier descriptor for rapid matching of patterns in image database

Invariance and low dimension of features are of crucial significance in pattern recognition. This paper proposes a novel orthonormal shell Fourier descriptor that satisfies all of these demands. This method first performs orthonormal shell decomposition on the line moment that is obtained from the 2-D pattern, then applies Fourier transform on each scale of the shell coefficients. Unlike other existing wavelet-based methods, our method allows applying common orthonormal wavelets, such as Daubechies, Symmlet and Coiflet, therefore it is simple to implement. We study the structure of the filter used and develop a fast algorithm to rapidly compute the spectra of orthonormal shell coefficients. The complexity of the proposed descriptor is O (n log n). We apply a coarse-to-fine strategy to search the image database; the matching is very quick because of the multiscale feature structure. The effectiveness of this new descriptor is demonstrated by a series of experiments as well as the comparison with other descriptors. The proposed descriptor is robust to white noise.