A Functional Data Framework For Analyzing Shapes and Textures in Images

Abstract: Images represent objects characterized by contours and textures. From a statistical perspective these features can be defined as observations of continuous random functions. However, most existing approaches rely on pixel-based discretizations which lead to high-dimensional representations and heavy computational costs. In this note, we introduce an alternative more frugal representation. This representation assumes that the object has a star-shaped domain interior. Under this condition, we explore the analysis of images from a functional data analysis perspective. The proposed framework is illustrated on a real data supervised image classification problem.