Segmentation of 3D textured images using continuous wavelet transform

A common assumption of the shape from texture problem is that a perceived image mainly contains only one type of texture with the same surface orientation. Unfortunately, a natural image is often composed of more than one textures. In order to solve the shape from texture problem in a practical manner, we need to segment 3D textured images. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for the task. We estimate the local surface orientations from the the scales of the ridge points of continuous wavelet transform. Then, the local surface orientations are used as the features for texture segmentation. Textured images synthesized from Brodatz's album and several natural images demonstrate the performance of our method.