Pyramid algorithms for finding global structures in images

Abstract Multiresolution, or pyramid , approaches to computer vision provide the capability of rapidly detecting and extracting global structures (features, regions, patterns, etc.) from an image. The human visual system too is able to spontaneously, or “preattentively,” perceive various types of global structure in its input; this process is sometimes called perceptual organization . This paper describes a set of pyramid-based algorithms that can detect and extract these types of structure; these include algorithms for inferring three-dimensional information from images and for processing time sequences of images. If implemented in parallel on cellular pyramid hardware, these algorithms require processing times on the order of the logarithm of the image diameter.