The fact that objects in the world appear in dierent ways depending on the scale of observation has important

implications if one aims at describing them. It shows that the notion of scale is of utmost importance when processing unknown measurement data by automatic methods. In their seminal works, Witkin (1983) and Koenderink (1984) proposed to approach this problem by representing image structures at dierent scales in a so-called scale-space representation. Tradition al scale-space theory building on this work, however, does not address the problem of how to select local appropriate scales for further analysis. This article proposes a systematic methodology for dealing with this problem. A framework is proposed for generating hypotheses about interesting scale levels in image data, based on a general principle stating that local extrema over scal es of dierent combinations of -normalized derivatives are likely candidates to correspond to interesting structures. Speci

cally, it is shown how this idea can be used as a major mechanism in algorithms for automatic scale selection, which adapt the local scales of processing to the local image structure.