The design and use of steerable filters

TLDR: The authors present an efficient architecture to synthesize filters of arbitrary orientations from linear combinations of basis filters, allowing one to adaptively steer a filter to any orientation, and to determine analytically the filter output as a function of orientation.

Abstract: The authors present an efficient architecture to synthesize filters of arbitrary orientations from linear combinations of basis filters, allowing one to adaptively steer a filter to any orientation, and to determine analytically the filter output as a function of orientation. Steerable filters may be designed in quadrature pairs to allow adaptive control over phase as well as orientation. The authors show how to design and steer the filters and present examples of their use in the analysis of orientation and phase, angularly adaptive filtering, edge detection, and shape from shading. One can also build a self-similar steerable pyramid representation. The same concepts can be generalized to the design of 3-D steerable filters. >