Color Texture
Color Texture
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: Describing textures is a challenging problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. The classification
Received 27 April 2014 problem involves assigning a category label to the texture class it belongs to. Several factors such as variations
Available online 12 August 2014
in scale, illumination and viewpoint make the problem of texture description extremely challenging. A
variety of histogram based texture representations exists in literature. However, combining multiple texture
Keywords:
descriptors and assessing their complementarity is still an open research problem. In this paper, we first
Texture features
Color features show that combining multiple local texture descriptors significantly improves the recognition performance
Texture classification compared to using a single best method alone. This gain in performance is achieved at the cost of high-
Image classification dimensional final image representation. To counter this problem, we propose to use an information-theoretic
compression technique to obtain a compact texture description without any significant loss in accuracy. In
addition, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of pure color descriptors, popular in object recognition,
for the problem of texture classification. Experiments are performed on four challenging texture datasets
namely, KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b, FMD and Texture-10. The experiments clearly demonstrate that our
proposed compact multi-texture approach outperforms the single best texture method alone. In all cases,
discriminative color names outperforms other color features for texture classification. Finally, we show that
combining discriminative color names with compact texture representation outperforms state-of-the-art
methods by 7.8%, 4.3% and 5.0% on KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b and Texture-10 datasets respectively.
© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) [30] based image representations. Other
than texture classification, LBP have been successfully employed to
Classifying textures is a difficult problem in computer vision and solve other vision problems as well, such as object detection [48],
pattern recognition. The task is to associate a class label to its respec- face recognition [1] and pedestrian detection [42]. LBP describes the
tive texture category. In recent years, a variety of texture descrip- neighbourhood of a pixel by its binary derivatives which are used to
tion approaches have been proposed [30,10,20,5,9,52,12,41]. These form a short code to describe the pixel neighbourhood. A variety of
approaches can be divided into two categories, namely sparse and LBP variants have been proposed [10,47,45]. Combining multiple tex-
dense representations. The sparse representation works by detecting ture features, such as variants of LBP features, is still an open research
feature points either based on interest point or dense sampling strat- problem. The work of Guo et al. [9] proposes a learning framework
egy. Feature description is then performed on these sampling points to combine variants of LBP features for texture classification. Tan and
[20,49]. The second strategy, dense representations, involves extract- Triggs [38] propose to combine Gabor wavelets and LBP features for
ing local features for each pixel in an image [30,10,5]. In this paper, the problem of face recognition. In this paper, we propose to use a
we investigate the problem of texture classification using dense local heterogeneous feature set by combining multiple texture description
texture representations. methods.
A variety of texture description approaches exist in literature Combining multiple texture description methods have an in-
[30,10,20,5,9,52]. One of the most successful approaches is that herent problem of high-dimensional final image representations.
Recently, Elfiky et al. [7] proposed to use a divisive informa-
tion theoretic clustering (DITC) method [6] to counter the prob-
R
This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Y. Liu.
∗
lem of high-dimensionality of bag-of-words based spatial pyramid
Corresponding author.
[Link]
0167-8655/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
F.S. Khan et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 51 (2015) 16–22 17
representations. The DITC compression was shown to reduce the di- perceptually inspired image features are proposed by Sharan et al.
mensionality of image representations without any significant loss in [35] for texture classification.
accuracy. Similar to the work of Elfiky et al. [7], we propose to use the Combining multiple texture representations for robust classifi-
DITC approach to compress the high-dimensional multi-texture rep- cation [9,24,38,11] is an interesting problem. The work of Tan and
resentation. However, different to the work of Elfiky et al. [7], here we Triggs [38] combines Gabor wavelets and LBP for the problem of
investigate compressing a multi-texture histogram to obtain a single face recognition. Ylioinas et al. [46] combine contrast information
heterogeneous texture representation. together with local binary patterns for improved gender classifica-
Generally, state-of-the-art texture descriptors operate on grey tion. A combination of HOG, LBP and Gabor features is used by Li
level images thereby ignoring the color information. Color in com- et al. [23] for gender classification. To counter the dimensionality of
bination with shape features has been shown to yield excellent re- the proposed image representation, Partial Least Squares (PLS) is used
sults for object recognition [32,18,19], object detection [16] and ac- to learn a low-dimensional representation. Hong et al. [11] propose
tion recognition [15]. Color description is a challenging problem due a numerical variant of LBP which is efficient and rotation invariant.
to significant variations in color caused by changes in illumination, The method is combined with other cues by a covariance matrix. Guo
shadows and highlights. Recent works have shown that an explicit et al. [9] propose a learning framework to fuse a variety of LBP variants
color representation improves the performance for object recogni- such as conventional LBP, rotation invariant patterns, local patterns
tion [18,19], object detection [16] and action recognition [15]. In with anisotropic structure, completed local binary patterns and local
this paper, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of pure color ternary patterns. Similar to Guo et al. [9], we investigate the problem
descriptors, popular in object recognition, for the task of texture of combining multiple texture description approaches. However, in-
classification. stead of only combining LBP variants [9], we here investigate fusing
Contributions: We first show that combining multiple texture de- multiple texture descriptors to obtain a single heterogeneous texture
scription methods significantly improves the performance compared representation.
to using the single best texture method alone. We further propose to A variety of color description approaches have been proposed in
use information theoretic compression approach to compress high- the field of object and scene recognition [8,3,43,32,18,19]. Bosch et al.
dimensional multi-texture features into a compact heterogeneous [3] propose to compute SIFT descriptors directly on HSV channels for
texture representation. Finally, we provide a comprehensive evalu- image classification. A comprehensive evaluation of color descriptors
ation of color features, popular in object recognition, for the task of is performed by Sande et al. [32]. It has been shown that using an
texture classification. This paper extends our earlier work [17] for explicit color descriptor significantly improves the performance for
texture classification that only evaluated the contribution of color for object recognition [18,19], object detection [16], texture recognition
texture recognition. Beyond the work in [17], we here investigate the [17] and action recognition [15]. In this work, we perform a com-
problem of combining multiple local texture descriptors for robust prehensive evaluation of pure color descriptors, popular in object
texture description. We perform extensive experiments on four chal- recognition, for the problem of texture classification.
lenging texture datasets namely, KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b, FMD and
Texture-10.
The results of our experiments clearly demonstrate that combin- 3. Combining multiple texture descriptors
ing multi-texture descriptors significantly improves the performance
compared to the single best method alone. We further show that Here we present our framework of combining multiple texture
multi-texture representations can be compressed efficiently without features and obtaining a compact heterogeneous texture represen-
any significant loss in accuracy. Finally, our comprehensive evaluation tation. We combine five texture descriptors namely, completed local
of color features suggest that discriminative color names outperforms binary patterns [10], WLD descriptor [5], binary Gabor pattern [51],
other color descriptors for texture recognition. By combining the best local phase quantization descriptor [31] and binarized statistical fea-
color descriptor with our compact heterogenous texture represen- tures [14]. We start by providing a brief overview of the five texture
tation provides state-of-the-art results on three of the four texture descriptors used in this work.
datasets. Completed local binary patterns [10]: The completed local binary
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 3 we investigate the patterns (CLBP) extends the conventional LBP operator by incorporat-
problem of combining multiple texture descriptors. A comprehensive ing local difference sign-magnitude transform information (LDSMT).1
evaluation of pure color descriptors for texture description is provided The LDSMT further consists of two components, namely the difference
in Section 4. In Section 5 we provide experimental results. Section 6 sign and difference magnitude encoded by a binary code. Likewise
finishes with concluding remarks. the conventional LBP, a region is also represented by its center pixel
encoded by a binary code after global thresholding. The final image
representation is obtained by concatenating the three binary code
2. Related work maps to form a single histogram.
WLD descriptor [5]: The WLD descriptor is inspired by Weber’s
A variety of texture description approaches have been pro- Law and encodes both differential excitations and orientations at lo-
posed in recent years [30,10,20,5,9,52,47,22]. Varma and Zisser- cations. The first component, differential excitation, captures the ratio
man [41] propose a statistical approach for texture modeling us- between the intensity difference of a pixel with its neighbors and the
ing the joint probability distribution of filter responses. A multires- intensity of the current pixel. The second component captures the
olution approach based on local binary patterns (LBP) is proposed gradient orientation of the current pixel.
by Ojala et al. [30] for gray-scale and rotation invariant texture Binary Gabor patterns [51]: The binary Gabor patterns (BGP) is a
classification. The LBP is one of the most successful approaches rotation invariant texture descriptor. Unlike MR8 filters [41], BGP
for texture classification with several variants existing in litera- uses pre-defined rotation invariant binary patterns and does not
ture [10,47,45]. Chen et al. [5] propose a method based on We- require a pre-training phase to learn a texton dictionary. Unlike
ber’s law consisting of two components namely differential exci- LBP, where each sign is binary coded from the difference of two
tation and orientation. An image is represented by concatenating
the two components in a single representation. ul Hussain and
Triggs [12] introduce an approach that uses lookup-table based vec- 1
We experimented with different variants of LBP and found CLBP to provide superior
tor quantization for texture description. A set of low and mid-level performance.
18 F.S. Khan et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 51 (2015) 16–22
single pixels, BGP adopts the difference of regions to counter the 4. Combining color and texture
noise sensitivity problem.
Local phase quantization [31]: The local phase quantization (LPQ) There exist two main strategies namely, early and late fu-
descriptor works by quantizing the phase information of the Fourier sion, to combine color and texture information [29,17]. Early fu-
transform and is robust to image blur. To counter the problem of heavy sion works by computing texture descriptor on the color chan-
image blur, the approach uses short-term Fourier transform with a nels. In this way, a joint color–texture representation is obtained
uniform function. A data correlation scheme is also incorporated into that combines the two cues at the pixel-level. Early fusion based
the descriptor which plays a crucial role in case of a sharp image. The image representation has the advantage of being more discrimi-
LPQ descriptor is shown to provide excellent results for both texture native since the two cues are combined at the pixel level. How-
and face recognition tasks. ever, early fusion representations suffers from the problem of high
Binarized statistical descriptor [14]: The binarized statistical image dimensionality.
feature (BSIF) represents each pixel by a binary code. These binary Contrary to early fusion, late fusion combines the two cues at the
codes are constructed by learning a set of basis vectors from natural image level. A separate histogram is constructed for color and texture.
images using independent component analysis and an efficient scalar The two visual cues are then combined by concatenating the separate
quantization scheme. The number of basis vectors determines the histograms into a single representation. The late fusion approach has
length of the pixel binary codes used to construct the final histogram shown to provide superior results for texture recognition [29,17],
of an image. object recognition [18], object detection [16] and action recognition
In our approach, each image is represented by the five aforemen- [15]. Therefore, in this work, we use late fusion scheme for combining
tioned texture description methods. The final representation is ob- color and texture information. Next, we provide an overview of pure
tained by concatenating all five texture representations into a single color descriptors.
histogram, H = [ht1 , ht2 , ht3 , ht4 , ht5 ]. This multi-texture histogram is
then input to the classifier for texture classification.
4.1. Pure color descriptors
3.1. Compact multi-texture representation Here, we provide a brief overview of the pure color descriptors,
popular in object recognition, for the problem of texture description.
The multi-texture representation has the disadvantage of being RGB histogram [32]: We use the standard RGB descriptor as
high-dimensional (more than 3k of size) for an image. This is problem- a baseline. The RGB histogram is constructed by combining the
atic as it significantly increases the computational time and memory three histograms from the R, G and B channels. The descriptor has
usage in the classification stage. Recently, Elfiky et al. [7] proposed 45 dimensions.
a compression approach using the DITC algorithm [6] to counter the rg histogram [32]: The rg histogram is based on the normalized
high-dimensionality issue of the bag-of-words based spatial pyra- RGB color model. The descriptor is 45 dimensional. It is invariant to
mid representation. In this work, we also use the same underlying light intensity changes and shadows.
approach to compress the high-dimensional multi-texture represen- Opponent-angle histogram [43]: Unlike other pure color descriptors
tation. However, the difference with the work of Elfiky et al. [7], is that based on the (transformed) RGB values of the image, the opponent-
here we investigate the DITC algorithm to solve the problem of com- angle histogram is constructed based on image derivatives. The his-
pressing multi-texture histogram to obtain a single heterogeneous togram has 36 dimensions.
texture representation. HUE histogram [43]: The HUE descriptor was proposed by Weijer
The DITC algorithm has been shown to obtain excellent results in and Schmid [43] and consists of 36 dimensions. In this descriptor, the
reducing large histograms to compact ones. The algorithm is designed hue is weighted by the saturation of a pixel in order to counter the
to find a fixed number of clusters that minimize the loss in mutual in- instabilities in hue.
formation between clusters and the category labels of training images. Transformed color distribution [32]: The transformed color descrip-
The DITC algorithm works on the class-conditional distributions over tor is derived by normalizing each channel of RGB histogram. The
the texture histograms. The class-conditional estimation is measured descriptor has 45 dimensions. It is invariant with respect to scale and
by the probability distributions p(R|h), where R = {r1 , r2 , . . . , rO } is light intensity.
the set of O classes. The DITC algorithm works by estimating the drop Color moments and invariants [32]: In the work of van de Sande
in mutual information I between the histogram H and the class la- et al. [32], the color moment histogram is constructed by using all
bels R. The transformation from the original texture histogram H to generalized color moments up to the second degree and the first order.
the new representation HR = {H1 , H2 , . . . , HJ } (where every Hj repre- The color moment invariants are constructed using generalized color
sents a group of words in the original uncompressed histogram) is moments. The color moments histogram has 36 dimensions whereas
equal to the color moment invariants has 24 dimensions.
Hue-saturation descriptor: The hue-saturation descriptor is invari-
J ant to luminance variations. The histogram has 36 dimensions (nine
ΔI = I R; H − I R; HR = p h KL(p(R|h), p(R|Hj )), (1) bins for hue times four for saturation).
j=1 h∈Hj Color names [44]: Most of the color descriptors discussed above are
designed to achieve photometric invariance. Instead, color names de-
scriptor aims at providing a certain degree of photometric invariance
where KL is the Kullback–Leibler divergence between the two distri-
with discriminative power. The color names are used in daily life by
butions defined by
humans to communicate color, such as “black”, “blue” and “orange”.
Here, we use the 11 dimensional color names mapping learned from
p1 (z)
KL(p1 , p2 ) = p1 (z)log . (2) the Google images by van de Weijer et al. [44].
p2 (z)
z∈Z Discriminative color descriptors [19]: The discriminative color de-
scriptors by Khan et al. [19] take an information theoretic ap-
The multi-texture histogram bins with similar discriminative proach to the problem of color description. The method works
power are merged together over the classes. For more details, we by clustering color values together based on their discriminative
refer to Dhillon et al. [6] on the DITC algorithm. power with an objective function to minimize the drop of mutual
F.S. Khan et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 51 (2015) 16–22 19
information of the final color representation. In this work, we use the and Texture-10, respectively. The results clearly suggest that differ-
three universal color representations with 11, 25 and 50 dimensions, ent texture representations possess complementary information and
respectively. should be combined to obtain a significant performance boost.
Fig. 1. Example images from the four texture datasets, KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b, FMD and Texture-10, used in our experiments.
20 F.S. Khan et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 51 (2015) 16–22
Table 1
Classification accuracy (%) of different texture representations on four texture datasets. In all cases, combining multi-texture representations significantly improves
the performance compared to the single best texture method.
The bold enteries in the table correspond to the highest performance (number) compared to other methods.
Table 2
Classification accuracy (%) obtained when using the original high-dimensional texture and compact texture representations. Note that the compression method
reduces the dimensionality with little or no loss in accuracy.
Original texture feature 3184 80.8 ±5.3 68.9 ±1.7 51.6 79.3
Compact texture (DITC) 500 82.2 ±5.4 69.0 ±1.6 49.0 78.0
The bold enteries in the table correspond to the highest performance (number) compared to other methods.
Table 3
Comparison (%) of pure color descriptors on four texture datasets. Note that the best
performance is obtained by using discriminative color names with 50 dimensions.
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