Uniform estimation of orientation using local and nonlocal 2-D energy operators

Two new two dimensional (2-D) complex operators for estimating the energy and orientation of 2-D oriented patterns are proposed. The starting point for our work is a new 2-D extension of the Teager-Kaiser energy operator incorporating orientation estimation. The first new energy operator is based on partial derivatives and can be considered a local (point-based) estimator. Using a nonlocal (pseudo-differential) operator we derive a second and more general energy operator. A scale invariant nonlocal operator is derived from the recently proposed spiral phase quadrature (or Riesz) transform. The Teager-Kaiser energy operator and the phase congruency local energy are unified in a single equation for both 1-D and 2- D. Robust orientation estimation, important for isotropic demodulation of fringe patterns is demonstrated. Theoretical error analysis of the local operator is greatly simplified by a logarithmic formulation. Experimental results using the operators on noisy images are shown. In the presence of Gaussian additive noise both the local and nonlocal operators give improved performance when compared with a simple gradient based estimator.