Design of Feature Extraction Operators for use on Biologically Motivated Hexagonal Image Structures

For many years the concept of using hexagonal pixelsfor image capture has been investigated, and severaladvantages of such an approach have been highlighted.Recently there has been a renewed interest in the use ofhexagonal images: biologically inspired approaches,representation of architectures for such images andgeneral hexagonal image processing. We present multiscalehexagonal gradient operators that are developedwithin the finite element framework for use directly onhexagonal pixel-based images. We evaluate the proposedoperators using simulated hexagonal images and provideperformance evaluation using the Figure of Merittechnique for comparison with existing hexagonal gradientoperators.