A Riemanian Approach to Blob Detection in Manifold-Valued Images

This paper is devoted to the problem of blob detection in manifold-valued images. Our solution is based on new definitions of blob response functions. We define the blob response functions by means of curvatures of an image graph, considered as a submanifold. We call the proposed framework Riemannian blob detection. We prove that our approach can be viewed as a generalization of the grayscale blob detection technique. An expression of the Riemannian blob response functions through the image Hessian is derived. We provide experiments for the case of vector-valued images on 2D surfaces: the proposed framework is tested on the task of chemical compounds classification.