FEATURE-FREE IMAGES

This paper extends earlier work by Morrone and Owens (1987) on the loc al energy feature detection scheme by explicitly identifying the class of images that are feature-free, that is, for which the local energy function has no local maxima. It is shown that the phase congruency fu nction, which measures the degree of order in the phase spectrum of th e image, uniquely represents that image apart from a feature-free imag e. This results in a demonstration that the features in an image, that is, those points at which the local energy function has a local maxim um, are stable with respect to a large class of image variations.