Efficient computation of local geometric moments

IEEE Trans Image Process. 2002;11(9):1102-11. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2002.802532.

Abstract

Local moments have attracted attention as local features in applications such as edge detection and texture segmentation. The main reason for this is that they are inherently integral-based features, so that their use reduces the effect of uncorrelated noise. The computation of local moments, when viewed as a neighborhood operation, can be interpreted as a convolution of the image with a set of masks. Nevertheless, moments computed inside overlapping windows are not independent and convolution does not take this fact into account. By introducing a matrix formulation and the concept of accumulation moments, this paper presents an algorithm which is computationally much more efficient than convolving and yet as simple.