Biology-inspired design of digital Gabor filters upon a hexagonal sampling scheme

A novel design of a digital Gabor filter bank is proposed. In contrast to known implementations of Gabor filters, the presented architecture is biologically motivated and therefore consists of a cascade of sub-filters covering the major processing layers found in mammal visual systems from photoreceptors over ganglion cells in the retina up to simple cells in the primary visual cortex. Unlike conventional image processing systems, the filter bank presented is based upon a hexagonal sampling scheme, like in biology. Thus, less samples are needed compared to a rectangular sampling while complying with SHANNON, that reduces the computation time for processing. Other features of the hexagonal grid, like superior symmetry and definite neighbourhood are of advantageous in image processing aspects as well