Overlapped Rectangle Image Representation and Its Application to Exact Legendre Moments Computation

Linear quadtree is a popular image representation method due to its convenient imaging procedure. However, the excessive emphasis on the symmetry of segmentation, i.e. dividing repeatedly a square into four equal sub-squares, makes linear quadtree not an optimal representation. In this paper, a no-loss image representation, referred to as Overlapped Rectangle Image Representation (ORIR), is presented to support fast image operations such as Legendre moments computation. The ORIR doesn’t importune the symmetry of segmentation, and it is capable of representing, by using an identical rectangle, the information of the pixels which are not even adjacent to each other in the sense of 4-neighbor and 8-neighbor. Hence, compared with the linear quadtree, the ORIR significantly reduces the number of rectangles required to represent an image. Based on the ORIR, an algorithm for exact Legendre moments computation is presented. The theoretical analysis and the experimental results show that the ORIR-based algorithm for exact Legendre moments computation is faster than the conventional exact algorithms.