Skewed alpha-stable distributions for modelling textures

In this letter, we introduce a novel family of texture models which provide alternatives to texture models which are based on Gaussian distributions. In particular, we introduce linear textures generated with a member of the alpha-stable distribution family which is a generalisation of the Gaussian distribution. The new family of texture models is capable of representing both impulsive and unsymmetric (skewed) image data which cannot be accommodated by the Gaussian model. We present new techniques for texture model estimation and we demonstrate the success of the techniques on synthetic data.