IMAGE BROWSING USING LEGENDRE POLYNOMIALS AND WAVELETS

A.C.Sankaranarayanan

Department of Electrical Engineering

IIT Madras
aswinch@ee.iitm.ernet.in

S.N.Merchant

Advanced Centre for Research in Electronics (A.C.R.E)

IIT Bombay
merchant@acre.iitb.ac.in

the image, but the time involved in computing

ABSTRACT
In this paper, we propose a new method for
image browsing by using Legendre Polynomials.
The complexity of computation and the time
involved in performing them are considerably
reduced using a wavelet based algorithm.
the associated vectors is higher than in
histograms. In this paper, we propose to
represent an image using 2-D Legendre
polynomials. This is computationally
expensive. Hence, we use a wavelet approach
to reduce the computational effort involved.
2. LEGENDRE POLYNOMIAL BASED BROWSING

In this section we recount the basic mathematics

1. INTRODUCTION
Image browsing has become a very important
field with the need for image recognition in
various day-to-day activities. Image browsing
has the potential to revolutionize the
traditional methods used in many areas such
as law enforcement, digital libraries. Hence,
there is a need for efficient and fast
techniques to browse and classify images in
real time. There exist traditional methods for
image browsing such as the Histogram
Comparison Technique and Color
Corelograms [1]. These are used to come up
with a set of images that are closely related to
a reference image (which is the input to the
problem). The resultant set is then subjected
to refinement techniques that try and identify
the closest match to the reference image.
Histogram based techniques are very popular
because of their relatively low complexity.
However, histograms do not preserve spatial
information. Color corelograms do preserve
some information on the spatial structure of
behind Legendre polynomials. These polynomials
are used in many areas of mathematics, physics
and engineering. They have been well studied
from a mathematical point of view.
2.1 DEFINITON (LEGENDRE POLYNOMIAL)
Legendre polynomial [2] of order ‘k’, denoted
Lk(x), is given as follows,
Legendre polynomials can also be recursively
1 d k ( x 2 − 1)
Lk ( x ) =
2 k .k! dx k
(2k − 1).x.Lk −1 ( x) + (k − 1).Lk − 2 ( x)
Lk ( x ) =
k
calculated using the relation,
It can be shown that Legendre polynomials form
an orthonormal basis for all continuous set in the
interval [-1, +1],

+1
2 expansion causes some loss in information.
∫ L ( x).L ( x).dx = (2i − 1) δ
−1
i j ij
Hence, any continuous function in the interval
[-1, +1] can be expressed as a linear combination
of Legendre polynomials.
N −1
f ( x) = ∑ ci .Li ( x)
i =0
These arguments can also be extended for
bivariate functions also. A 2D continuous
function can be expressed as a linear
combination of a product of Legendre
polynomials,
f ( x, y ) = ∑∑ cij .Li ( x).L j ( y )
i j
where the coefficients can be found out by the
following relation.
1 1
(2i + 1)(2 j + 1)
cij =
4 ∫ ∫ f ( x. y) Li ( x) L j ( y)dxdy
−1 −1
Thus, an image of size (row*col) can be
translated to a function between [-1,-1] and
[+1,+1] by assuming row/2 pixels per unit length
along x-axis and col/2 pixels per unit length
along y-axis. The entire image is fit in the 2 x 2
space around the origin to represent the whole
image using Legendre polynomials. Then the
2D Legendre polynomial coefficients Cmn are
calculated for 0 ≤ m, n < N0, where N0 is an
integer chosen as a parameter for the technique.
Hence, we have N02 coefficients.
A measure of distance between 2 images C & D
with coefficients c1, c2… ck and d1, d2… dk
respectively can be calculated by using the
standard difference formula
∆ CD = ∑ | ci − d i |
i frequency input is much larger. This is because
It should be noted that the k used in the above
equations corresponds to the N02 parameters
discussed above. The image in the image
database with the smallest difference is the
retrieved image. Other difference measures such
as the Euclidean distance of vectors can be used.
Theoretically, all the (infinitely many)
coefficients of the Legendre polynomial
expansion are needed for this difference to be
computed. But the use of N02 coefficients of the
Therefore if we reconstruct the signal using the
N02 coefficients, the reconstructed signal f’ will
not match the original signal f.
f ' ( x, y ) = ∑∑ c mn .Lm ( x).Ln ( y )
m n
for 0 ≤ m, n < N0
It is easily seen that the retrieval efficiency
depends on the value of N02 we choose. The
higher the value of N02 the lesser is the
difference between f and f’. However, a high N02
value means that a large amount of time will be
needed for computation of Legendre
polynomials. Again, another factor that
determines time taken for computation of
Legendre polynomial coefficients is the size of
the image. A larger image means more time. To
reduce the time that is required for computation
without any reasonable loss of retrieval
efficiency we could adopt a wavelet approach.
3 USING WAVELETS TO REDUCE COMPLEXITY
As seen in section 2, any image can be
decomposed into N02 Legendre coefficients. But
calculation of these coefficients can be a time
consuming process if a high value of N02 is used.
For example, if the value of N02 is doubled the
computation time increases fourfold. In case of
large images, this can be computationally
unacceptable.
There is lot of error if we represent a high
frequency signal using a finite number of
Legendre polynomials. To show this, we take as
inputs sinusoids of different frequencies. They
are broken down in to their first m Legendre
polynomial coefficients. With these m
coefficients we get the reconstructed signal and
thus, the error function (see figure 1). From this
figure, we can see that the error for high
of our usage of a finite number of Legendre
coefficients. The higher order Legendre
coefficients represent high frequency
components. Since we neglect the higher order
components while reconstructing, the high
frequency case shows greater error.
Image reconstruction using a finite number of
Legendre polynomials leads to loss of high
frequency data. We might as well remove the
high frequency data and then apply the
reconstruction techniques. This will not affect were characterized into faces, monuments and
the coefficient values for the Legendre scenarios. All images were in 8-bit grayscales.
polynomials. Wavelet [3][4][5] transformation The implementation was done partly in C and
can be used to reduce the computational time. partly using MatLab v5.3. Table (1) shows
The approximation coefficients of a signal are retrieval efficiency for various values of N0 and
equal to the signal after low pass filtering. The different scope. For example, if N0 = 7, the
main advantage here lies in the fact that the size polynomials from L0(x).L0(y) to L6(x).L6(y) are
of the signal gets reduces by half (one-fourth in used. Table (2) shows the retrieval success
the case of 2-D signal) every time we subject it percentage for different scopes and resolutions.
to transformation. We generate a subset of the database in which
Hence we can find the Legendre coefficient for we look for a match. The number of images in
the approximation coefficients of the image at a this subset is referred to as scope.
lower resolution. The reconstruction of an image
and the same image subjected to wavelet REFERENCES
transformation will essentially look the same.
(See figure 2). The following algorithm sums up [1] M.J.Swain and D.H.Ballard, Color Indexing,
the process of creating and querying the International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol 7,
database. No 1, 1991
[2] Legendre’s Equations and Legendre
4 PROPOSED ALGORITHM Polynomials, www.eng.uml.edu/dept/chemical/
[3] Amara Graps, An Introduction to Wavelets,
Compute the approximation coefficients I’ of the www.amara.com
image I at a lower resolution (say -2). This [4] Y.T.Chan, Wavelet Basics, Kluwer Academic
makes the size of image I’ one-sixteenth of the Publishers, 1995
original image I. Also I’ has no high frequency [5] S.G.Mallat, A Theory for Multiresolution
components. Signal Decomposition The Wavelet
2. Compute the first N02 Legendre coefficients for Representation, IEEE Transactions on Pattern
I’. Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol II, No 7,
3. Do steps 1 & 2 for every image in the image July1989
database to get a database of coefficients.
4. Subject the query image to the same process to
5. APPENDIX A: TABLES AND FIGURES
get its coefficients.
5. Using a comparison technique (say absolute
difference of vectors) determine the image in SCOPE N0 = 7 N0 = 9 N0 = 11
database that is the closest match to the query 1 50.00 50.00 56.25
image. 2 56.25 56.25 56.25
We can, thus, improve image retrieval efficiency 3 56.25 68.75 68.75
by increasing N02 and reduce the time involved by 4 68.75 75.00 75.00
calculating the coefficients for the image at a 5 68.75 81.25 75.00
lower resolution. The retrieval efficiency does not Table 1: This table shows retrieval success rates at different
suffer because of the lower resolution used. scopes and at different values of Legendre coefficients
However for large value of N02 there will be used i.e. different values of N0.
considerable differences in efficiency at various
resolutions. This approach can be used
effectively for images with low contrast. It can be
used effectively in areas such as shape
recognition.

5. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

As a preliminary test of this algorithm, we

constructed a database of images. The images
SCOPE → 1 2 3 4 5
 Resolution –1 50.00 56.25 68.75 75.00 81.25
Resolution –2 50.00 56.25 68.75 75.00 75.00
Resolution –4 50.00 50.00 56.25 56.25 56.25
Table 2:This table shows retrieval success rates at different scopes and approximation
coefficients of the image taken at different resolutions.

Figure 1: The three rows represent a) input signal (top) b) reconstructed signal (middle) and c) the error (bottom) . This is
done for two sinusoids of different frequencies as input. Note that the error if highly pronounced for the higher frequency
input.

Figure 2: This figure shows an image f (top) and the reconstructed image f’ (bottom) starting at two different resolutions.
The column on the left shows the reconstruction being done for the image at a resolution –2 and the right is at resolution –
1. Number of Legendre polynomials used was 7*7. Note that the reconstructed image looks the same in both the cases
(both lacking contrast, high frequency components are lost).