Selective Disk Bispectrum: A Complete and Rotation Invariant Image Descriptor

Abstract

Rotation invariance is a fundamental requirement across many computer vision tasks. Historically, this inductive bias has been encoded through hand-crafted rotation-invariant representations. These are compact, interpretable, and fast to compute, but they come at the cost of descriptive power. More recently, architectures achieve inductive bias through learned representations. These are highly descriptive and achieve strong empirical performance, at the cost of efficiency and interpretability. In this work, we propose an alternative at the intersection of both paradigms. We introduce the selective disk bispectrum (SDB), a complex-valued rotation-invariant vector that preserves all information about the image except its orientation. Our key theoretical contributions are the selective disk bispectrum, its inversion, its (reduced) spatial and computational complexities (compared to the full disk bispectrum), and its expectation and variance under noise. Furthermore, we propose a numerical SDB approximation and provide theoretical guarantees for its accuracy and rotation invariance. Empirically, we validate SDB's invariance and robustness to noise classification tasks. We test our reconstruction algorithm on multi-reference alignment of rotated images.