Meaningful Alignments

A. Desolneux, L. Moisan, J.-M. Morel

We propose a method for detecting geometric structures in an image, without any a priori information. Roughly speaking, we say that an observed geometric event is ``meaningful'' if the expectation of its occurences would be very small in a random image. We discuss the apories of this definition, solve several of them by introducing ``maximal meaningful events'' and analyzing their structure. This methodology is applied to the detection of alignments in images.

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