The first order absolute moment in low-level image processing

The first order absolute moment provides a ridge map similar to the one provided by the GoG (gradient of Gaussian) filter. However, unlike the GoG filter, the first order absolute moment provides ridges at both edges and lines and gives rise to local extrema of the ridges at line endings, corners and junctions. Furthermore, a class of filters is obtained by introducing three low-pass filters at three different stages of the original filter. A thresholding procedure and the zero-crossing maps of an equivalent LoG (Laplacian of Gaussian) filter are obtained by combining the recovered edge information.