Directional Variance: A measure to find the directionality in a given image segment

In this paper we consider the problem of finding the direction of the content in a given image segment to foster the development of adaptive directional decompositions of images. We propose a mechanism based on a new directional metric that we define as Directional Variance (DirVar), a measure of variance along the discrete lines in the given direction. The simulation results in section III, within the frame work of directionlets [9], [10] and in the lifting based directional DWT [12], [13], show that our mechanism is very accurate and reliable in finding the content direction and saves lot of computations.