Efficient Edge Detection and Object Segmentation Using

Gabor Filters
Yiming Ji Kai H. Chang Chi-Cheng Hung
Depart of Computer Science and Depart of Computer Science and School of Computing and Software
Software Engineering Software Engineering Engineering
Auburn University Auburn University Southern Polytechnic State University
334-8446333 334-8446329 770-5283574
jiyimin@auburn.edu kchang@eng.auburn.edu chung@spsu.edu

ABSTRACT f ( x ) = ∑
ω ∈ R
F (ω ) e 2 π iω t

Gabor filter is a widely used feature extraction method, especially

in image texture analysis. The selection of optimal filter
parameters is usually problematic and unclear. This study
analyzes the filter design essentials and proposes two different
methods to segment the Gabor filtered multi-channel images. The
first method integrates Gabor filters with labeling algorithm for
edge detection and object segmentation. The second method uses
the K-means clustering with simulated annealing for image
segmentation of a stack of Gabor filtered multi-channel images.
Various experiments with real images demonstrate the
effectiveness of these approaches.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.2.0 [Image]: segmentation, denoising
∫
− 2 π ix ω
F (ω ) = f ( x ) e dx
R
In signal analysis, f(x) describes the temporal behavior, and F(ω)
describes the frequency behavior. In general, Fourier expansion
is difficult to recognize features between f and F, so it is an ideal
tool only for stationary (or time invariant) signals.
Gabor expansion is a time-frequency analysis method, which was
introduced in 1946 by Dennis Gabor [2]. This expansion
introduces a time-localization Gaussian window function (g(t-x),
where x is a shifting parameter used to translate the window in
order to cover the whole time domain) for extracting local
information of signal with the form similar to the Fourier
transformation [3][4][5]:

General Terms C ( x , ω ) = ∫ f (t ) g (t − x )e − 2 π it ω
dt
Algorithms, Theory R

where g(t − x ) is the conjugate form of g(t-x), and coefficient

Keywords
Gabor filter, segmentation, labeling, K-means, simulated
annealing.
1. INTRODUCTION
Image segmentation continues to be an important and active
research area in image analysis. In order to analyze complicated
image signals, engineers and mathematicians have been searching
for a simple, yet well-understood representation. Fourier
expansions, Gabor expansions, and Wavelet expansions are good
examples.
Fourier expansion [1] represents signals in a series of sine waves,
and the classical Fourier analysis employs two complementary
representations: the function f itself and its transforms F:
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C(x, ω) depends linearly on the original signal f(t). Some
properties of the Gabor transform (energy preservation, inversion
formula) are similar to those of the Fourier transformation. The
Gabor filter tries to search and investigate the intermediate
representations which combine the information of both time/space
information f and frequency information F [6-7]. The goal is a
simultaneous description of the temporal and spectral behavior of
a function or signal f. Such a representation is essentially two-
dimensional, measuring both behavior of the frequency w and
time/space t.
There are two main approaches for Gabor transform computation
[7]. One focuses on the matrix factorization, which is based on
the periodic and sparse structure of Gabor operator, and the
factorization holds in general and does not depend on number
theoretic condition on the lattice parameters of time/space and
frequency. The second and efficient method is an iterative
approach, which uses the Conjugate Gradient (CG) method to
approximate the optimal dual window. In general CG method is
more computationally efficient for large size matrix [7].
However, the classic Gabor expansion is computationally
expensive [3-5], and since it combines all the space and frequency
details of the original signal, it is difficult to take advantage of the
gigantic amount of numbers.
Fortunately, these problems can be partially overcome by using a
multi-channel filtering technique, which uses specified filters to
select the information at particular space/frequency points.

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Research has demonstrated that Gabor expansion can be
implemented as a multi-channel, wavelet-like filter and this multi-
channel filtering process mimics the characteristics of the human
visual system (HVS) [8-9]. If an image containing more than two
object regions is fed to a Gabor filter bank, then local spatial-
frequency differences between these objects hopefully will show
variation in the filtered sub-images. This filtering approach is a
natural way to manipulate variation between image objects.
Gabor filters have been used in detecting texture edge [10, 11].
However, it is based on traditional Gradient method. It does not
specify the choice of frequency/scale range, and as a result, it can
not take advantage of the edge information for further analysis.
Wavelet expansion is an excellent technique which is now
commonly used in image compressions and image restorations.
Comparing Gabor expansion with Wavelet analysis technique,
Oscar Nesta, Rafael Navarro, Javier Portilla and Antonio
Tabernero [12] concluded that Gabor expansion is the only
biologically plausible filters with orientation selectivity that can
be exactly expressed as a sum of only two separable filters [12,
13]. This unique property has made Gabor filter an important
transformation in image processing.
While there are many image segmentation algorithms and much
research has successfully used Gabor filters for texture analysis
[10, 11, 14, 16], this study tries to provide additional insight into
the design of optimal Gabor filters, and proposes two different
segmentation algorithms. The first approach integrates images
from all the channels and applies labeling algorithm for
segmentation. The second approach analyzes multi-channel
images using the K-means with simulated annealing algorithm.
Both methods have unique applications: the first one is very
efficient while the second is especially good for noisy image
analysis.
The next section presents the Gabor filter design. Section 3
applies the designed filters to images and discusses how Gabor
filters can capture image features by analyzing the edge
information. Then, in section 4, the labeling segmentation and the
K-means simulated annealing algorithm are briefly described.
Experiments on images are shown in section 5, and discussions
and conclusions then follow.
2. Gabor filter Design
2.1 Gabor function and multi-channel system
There are several forms of 2-D Gabor filter, and this study uses a
version similar to Daugman’s model which is used in spatial
summation properties (of the receptive fields) of simple cells in
the visual cortex [17]. It is defined as:
αβ
g ( x, y ) = exp( −α 2 x ' 2 + β 2 y ' 2 ) exp( j 2π f 0 x ' )
π
x ' = x cos θ + y sin θ
y ' = − x sin θ + y cos θ
where the arguments, x and y, specify the position of a scene, f0 is
the central frequency of a sinusoidal plane wave, θ is the counter
clockwise rotation of the Gaussian plane wave, and α and β are
the sharpness values of the major and minor axes of the elliptic
Gaussian.
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When an image is processed by a Gabor filter, the output is the
convolution of the image i(x,y) and the Gabor function g(x,y),
i.e., r ( x , y ) = g ( x , y ) * i ( x , y ) , where * denotes the two
dimensional convolution. This process can be used at different
frequencies and different orientations, and the result is a multi-
channel filter bank. Figure 1 illustrates the multi-channel filtering
system.
Figure 1 Gabor multi-channel system
In Fig. 1, operator | · | is the magnitude operator, and gk(x,y) is the
Gabor function in the kth channel, which denotes a specific
frequency and orientation.
With the multi-channel filtering system, an image will be
processed by all the channels simultaneously. The result is a
stack of filtered images which are defined at various frequencies
and orientations corresponding to all the channels in the system.
Hence, characteristic image information at each particular
frequency and individual orientation is obtained.
2.2 Choice of Gabor Filter Parameters
Although it is stated by David A. Clausi [8] that the collection of
results of every 30o will provide a robust and universal feature set,
this study uses four values of 0 o, 45 o, 90 o, and 135 o to save
computation time. According to [12], [14], [16], and [18], the
central frequency is selected according to the image dimension.
That is, the following set of values is used:
N cycles/image-width, with N being
2 ,2 2 ,..., and 2
4
the number of the image columns. The radial frequencies are all 1
octave apart [19].
Low frequency corresponds to smooth variations and constitutes
the base of an image and high frequency presents the edge
information which gives the detailed information in the image.
Hence, this study neglects the very low radial frequencies,
e.q., 2 , and 2 2 . Using these frequencies and orientations,
the Gabor filter Multi-channel system can present an image in
various orientations and frequencies.
3. Edge detection specifics
This section uses an image to analyze the boundary effect of the
Gabor filters. Figure 2 (2.a) shows a test image of size 100×154.
When the original image (2.a) is fed to the above Gabor multi-
channel system (no post-processing for this analysis), the
integration image is (2.b). In order to illustrate the details, image
(2.a) and (2.b) are filtered by the same low-pass filter, and the
results are (2.c) and (2.d) respectively. (The kernel length of the
low-pass filter is 5).
Image (2.a) contains 4 texture patterns of same size and each
pattern has 50X78 pixels. In order to compare the Gabor effect
along the texture boundaries, pixel intensities of images (2.c) and
(2.d) of Figure 2 along different rows and columns are
highlighted. Specifically, the pixel intensities along column No.
25 and column No. 85, and along rows 25 and 75 are marked with
the dotted lines.
Figure 2. A test image and results.
Fig. 3 shows the pixel intensities comparison result along the
specified rows and columns. The circled lines in Fig. 3 represent
the row/column pixel intensities of Gabor filtered image for (2.d)
and the continuous lines correspond to original image (2.c).
Figure 3. Intensities along specified rows/columns
It is obvious from Fig. 3 that the Gabor filters successfully
capture and optimize the distinctions along the border of object
regions (as circled by dotted ovals in Figure 3). For charts (3.a),
(3.b) and (3.c), the difference of intensities for the original image
is less that 0.15, while it is more than 0.4 for the Gabor processed
images. The reason is that Gabor filters only choose higher
frequency information (which stands for edge/boundary property)
from original images, and as a result, the edge is maximized and
different objects are separated. It is this property that provides
level information among objects and, therefore, basis for many
different segmentation algorithms. For example, some researchers
blur the Gabor filtered images one more step and apply threshold
to classify the texture images [13, 14, 16], and other researchers
use gradient to locate the boundary [10].
4. Image segmentation
Two different algorithms are proposed for the image
segmentation. One follows the traditional integration method and
applies the labeling algorithm for the integrated image for edge
detection and object segmentation. The second approach
combines simulated annealing method with K-means clustering
algorithm for a stack of multi-channel sub-images directly.
4.1 Labeling segmentation
In order to identify objects from the background, the obtained
image can be measured with different approaches [8, 13, 14, 16,
and 18]. The most common one is to integrate the multi-channel
images first, and the resultant image generally will be separated at
distinguishable intensity levels.
456
This study fully takes advantages of this property and labels
distinct components based on the labeling algorithm [20, 21, 22].
Then the connectivity of each labeled region is measured
accordingly. Here, a simple method is to count the number of the
pixels within a region: if there are few pixels in a labeled region,
it can be assumed that the pixels within the region may represent
noisy, unrelated signals and thus can be neglected; otherwise, the
region is considered to contain part of the edge information. In
this study, a threshold of 50 is used for all test images.
4.2 Segmentation by simulated annealing with
K-means
While the first method takes advantage of the overall effect of the
Gabor filtering images, this second method tries to analyze all the
muti-channel sub-images directly. Here, the K-means works on a
pixel vector instead of a single pixel value.
Simulated annealing is an optimization algorithm that is based on
the process of annealing metals. The integration of simulated
annealing with K-means is to search optimal clustering solution
by exploring most promising path similar to the way a metal
cooling down to optimal state [25]. Below details the process
involved in this algorithm.
Step 1: Determine the number of clusters (K) and initialize center
for the clusters.
Step 2: Define the temperature, Tmax for highest temperature and
Tmin for the cooling down value.
Step 3: Distribute pixel vectors into K clusters and calculate the
total variance among them.
Step 4: If the total variance is less than the first loop, keep the
distribution; otherwise, select a random number r by tossing a
dice and calculate the annealing probability:
P ( c ) = exp( − c / kT ) ,
where P(c) is the probability of a change of c in the objective
function and k is a constant analogous to Boltzmann’s constant
that must be chosen for the classification.
If annealing probability P(c) is greater than the random number,
keep the change, otherwise discard the update.
Step 5: Increase the iteration and update the temperature with:
T = T max /( 1 + iteration ) , repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 until
T<Tmin.
5. Experimental results
This section presents multiple experiments for the above Gabor
system. For labeling segmentation, three different applications
are demonstrated, and within each application, a group of two
images are provided. For the simulated annealing with the K-
means segmentation, a set of experiments are compared,
especially for noisy image.
5.1 Labeling segmentation
For each testing image, an intermediate Gabor filtered image and
the final edge or segmentation image are presented. All
experiments use the same parameters as discussed above, and the
experiments are performed in Matlab version 6.1.
The experiments presented here are mainly for illustrating the
algorithm, and all of them assume that there is only one main
object. However, for complex images, threshold can be used to
separate different object regions.

5.1.1 Edge detection

Fig. 4 shows two images, Bacteria (a1) and Rice (a2). Images
(b1) and (b2) are the Gabor filtered images and the resultant edge
images are (c1) and (c2).

Figure 6. Background segmentation.

In this experiment, the Gabor system separates objects and

their backgrounds, and the obtained boundary contours
show the backgrounds of the two images clearly. For the
Bonemarr image, the proposed method successfully detects
the dotted particle signals as shown in (c1).

5.1.3 Object segmentation

Fig. 7 shows two aurora images, aurora-1 (a1) and aurora-2 (a2).
Figure 4. Edge detection
Images (b1) and (b2) are the Gabor filtered images and images
As shown in (b1) and (b2), Gabor filter optimizes the edge (c1) and (c2) are aurora objects of (a) and (c), respectively
information of both images by separating the objects and their
backgrounds into two intensities levels and highlighting the
borders of bacteria and rice objects. Figure 5 shows two edge
images (bacteria and rice) generated by general Gradient based
edge detection algorithm. When compared with the Gabor results
(c1) and (c2), the Gradient edge detection algorithm does not
successfully capture some of the weak borders.

Figure 5. Edge detection with general Gradient algorithm Figure 7. Object Segmentation

Noted that there exist many variant algorithms for the Gradient
approach, and most of them are very good. For example, the
Canny method [23] finds edges by looking for local maxima of
the gradient of the image. The gradient is calculated using the
derivative of a Gaussian filter, and it is likely to detect true weak
edges with minor differences. However, pure edge detection
algorithm can not provide level information between object
regions.
Here, the Gabor filter effectively segments the aurora
objects while retaining the details of the auroras. When
compared with other segmentation algorithms, we find that
other segmentation methods can hardly keep the detailed
properties of the object. Figure 8 shows segmentation
results of the above aurora images by the K-means
algorithm [24].

5.1.2 Background segmentation

Fig. 6 shows two images, one is a Bonemarr image (a1) and the
other is an Afmsurf image (a2). Images (b1) and (b2) are Gabor
filtered images, and images (c1) and (c2) are the background of
(a1) and (a2), respectively.

Figure 8. Object segmentation using K-means algorithm

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5.2 Segmentation by simulated annealing with
K-means algorithm
5.2.1 Segmentation with original images and Gabor
filtered multi-channel images
A set of five satellite images are used in this experiment and one
of the images is shown in Fig. 9 (a). The original images and the
Gabor filtered multi-channel images are segmented by the
simulated annealing with K-means method; and the results are
shown in Fig. 9 (b) and (c).
Figure 9. Segmentation with simulated annealing with K-
means algorithm.
The cluster number K is 4 for this experiment. Though we do not
have ground data for more detailed comparisons, direct
examination shows the segmentation with Gabor filtered multi-
channel images presents better solutions.
5.2.2 Segmentation with noisy images
In this experiment, we first add Gaussian noise to the
original images and use the simulated annealing K-Means
algorithm to segment the noisy original images.
The noisy original image is shown in Fig. 10(a). The added noise
is Gaussian noise with average 0 and variance 0.1. We apply a
median filter for the noisy images and the restored image is
shown in Fig. 10(b). The segmentation results for the original
noisy images, restored noisy images and the Gabor filtered noisy
images are shown in Fig 10. (c), (d) and (e) separately.
It is shown that images (c) and (d) are still noisy, though (d) is
much better than (c), and the result (e) from the Gabor filtered
multi-channel does not contain any noisy signals. The reason is
that the Gabor multi-channel filtering process selects parts of
essential signals from original image and discards others
including the noise signals.
While there are many restoration algorithms, generally it is very
difficult to eliminate all the noisy signals, and when applying the
segmentation method to the restored images, the results will still
be noisy. The Gabor multi-channel filtering system can be
immune to the noise and thus it could be very useful in
segmenting real images.
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Figure 10. Segmentation of noisy images.
6. Discussions and Conclusions
This paper analyzes the details of the Gabor multi-channel
filtering system, and presents two new approaches for image
segmentation. Analysis of Gabor filter shows that it can optimize
the differences along borders among object regions, and thus they
are natural tools for image segmentation.
By using the multi-channel scheme, the provided Gabor system
avoids the tricky filter selection process. Both proposed
segmentation methods successfully take the advantages of the
Gabor filtering system. The labeling segmentation method
follows the common routine by integrating all the multi-channel
sub-images together, and applies labeling algorithm to the
integrated image. The simulated annealing K-means approach
tries a different solution by considering the multi-channel sub-
images directly and extracting the clusters optimally. Multiple
experiments show that with the presented segmentation methods,
the Gabor system can effectively eliminate noisy signals while
maintaining the details of the image objects successfully.
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