In a recent work, Koenderink and van Doorn consider a family of three intertwined scale-spaces coined the locally orderless image (LOI). The LOI represents the image, observed at inner scale ?, as a local histogram with bin-width ?, at each location, with a Gaussian- shaped region of interest of extent ?. LOIs form a natural and elegant extension of scale-space theory, show causal consistency and enable the smooth transition between pixels, histograms and isophotes. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the wide applicability and versatility of LOIs. We consider a range of image processing tasks, including variations of adaptive histogram equalization, several methods for noise and scratch removal, texture rendering, classification and segmentation.
Applications of locally orderless images
B. van Ginneken and B. ter Romeny
Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision 1999;1682:10-21.