Texture characterization is a key problem in image understanding and pattern recognition. In this paper, we present a flexible shape-based texture representation using shape co-occurrence patterns. More precisely, texture images are first represented by tree of shapes, each of which is associated with several geometrical and radiometric attributes. Then four typical kinds of shape co-occurrence patterns based on the hierarchical relationship of the shapes in the tree are learned as codewords. Three different coding methods are investigated to learn the codewords, with which, any given texture image can be encoded into a descriptive vector. In contrast with existing works, the proposed method not only inherits the strong ability to depict geometrical aspects of textures and the high robustness to variations of imaging conditions from the shape-based method, but also provides a flexible way to consider shape relationships and to compute high-order statistics on the tree. To our knowledge, this is the first time to use co-occurrence patterns of explicit shapes as a tool for texture analysis. Experiments on various texture datasets and scene datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.
The main purpose of this paper is to propose a new preprocessing step in order to improve local feature descriptors and texture classification. Preprocessing is implemented by using transformations which help highlight salient features that play a significant role in texture recognition. We evaluate and compare four different competing methods: three different anisotropic diffusion methods including the classical anisotropic Perona-Malik diffusion and two subsequent regularizations of it and the application of a Gaussian kernel, which is the classical multiscale approach in texture analysis. The combination of the transformed images and the original ones are analyzed. The results show that the use of the preprocessing step does lead to improved texture recognition.
Dynamic Textures (DTs) are sequences of images of moving scenes that exhibit certain stationarity properties in time such as smoke, vegetation and fire. The analysis of DT is important for recognition, segmentation, synthesis or retrieval for a range of applications including surveillance, medical imaging and remote sensing. Deep learning methods have shown impressive results and are now the new state of the art for a wide range of computer vision tasks including image and video recognition and segmentation. In particular, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently proven to be well suited for texture analysis with a design similar to a filter bank approach. In this paper, we develop a new approach to DT analysis based on a CNN method applied on three orthogonal planes x y , xt and y t . We train CNNs on spatial frames and temporal slices extracted from the DT sequences and combine their outputs to obtain a competitive DT classifier. Our results on a wide range of commonly used DT classification benchmark datasets prove the robustness of our approach. Significant improvement of the state of the art is shown on the larger datasets.
In the last decade, deep learning has contributed to advances in a wide range computer vision tasks including texture analysis. This paper explores a new approach for texture segmentation using deep convolutional neural networks, sharing important ideas with classic filter bank based texture segmentation methods. Several methods are developed to train Fully Convolutional Networks to segment textures in various applications. We show in particular that these networks can learn to recognize and segment a type of texture, e.g. wood and grass from texture recognition datasets (no training segmentation). We demonstrate that Fully Convolutional Networks can learn from repetitive patterns to segment a particular texture from a single image or even a part of an image. We take advantage of these findings to develop a method that is evaluated on a series of supervised and unsupervised experiments and improve the state of the art on the Prague texture segmentation datasets.
Fractal analysis has been widely used in computer vision, especially in texture image processing and texture analysis. The key concept of fractal-based image model is the fractal dimension, which is invariant to bi-Lipschitz transformation of image, and thus capable of representing intrinsic structural information of image robustly. However, the invariance of fractal dimension generally does not hold after filtering, which limits the application of fractal-based image model. In this paper, we propose a novel fractal dimension invariant filtering (FDIF) method, extending the invariance of fractal dimension to filtering operations. Utilizing the notion of local self-similarity, we first develop a local fractal model for images. By adding a nonlinear post-processing step behind anisotropic filter banks, we demonstrate that the proposed filtering method is capable of preserving the local invariance of the fractal dimension of image. Meanwhile, we show that the FDIF method can be re-instantiated approximately via a CNN-based architecture, where the convolution layer extracts anisotropic structure of image and the nonlinear layer enhances the structure via preserving local fractal dimension of image. The proposed filtering method provides us with a novel geometric interpretation of CNN-based image model. Focusing on a challenging image processing task --- detecting complicated curves from the texture-like images, the proposed method obtains superior results to the state-of-art approaches.
Texture classification is a problem that has various applications such as remote sensing and forest species recognition. Solutions tend to be custom fit to the dataset used but fails to generalize. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in combination with Support Vector Machine (SVM) form a robust selection between powerful invariant feature extractor and accurate classifier. The fusion of experts provides stability in classification rates among different datasets.
Meningioma brain tumour discrimination is challenging as many histological patterns are mixed between the different subtypes. In clinical practice, dominant patterns are investigated for signs of specific meningioma pathology; however the simple observation could result in inter- and intra-observer variation due to the complexity of the histopathological patterns. Also employing a computerised feature extraction approach applied at a single resolution scale might not suffice in accurately delineating the mixture of histopathological patterns. In this work we propose a novel multiresolution feature extraction approach for characterising the textural properties of the different pathological patterns (i.e. mainly cell nuclei shape, orientation and spatial arrangement within the cytoplasm). The pattern textural properties are characterised at various scales and orientations for an improved separability between the different extracted features. The Gabor filter energy output of each magnitude response was combined with four other fixed-resolution texture signatures (2 model-based and 2 statistical-based) with and without cell nuclei segmentation. The highest classification accuracy of 95% was reported when combining the Gabor filters energy and the meningioma subimage fractal signature as a feature vector without performing any prior cell nuceli segmentation. This indicates that characterising the cell-nuclei self-similarity properties via Gabor filters can assists in achieving an improved meningioma subtype classification, which can assist in overcoming variations in reported diagnosis.
We present a novel Affine-Gradient based Local Binary Pattern (AGLBP) descriptor for texture classification. It is very hard to describe complicated texture using single type information, such as Local Binary Pattern (LBP), which just utilizes the sign information of the difference between the pixel and its local neighbors. Our descriptor has three characteristics: 1) In order to make full use of the information contained in the texture, the Affine-Gradient, which is different from Euclidean-Gradient and invariant to affine transformation is incorporated into AGLBP. 2) An improved method is proposed for rotation invariance, which depends on the reference direction calculating respect to local neighbors. 3) Feature selection method, considering both the statistical frequency and the intraclass variance of the training dataset, is also applied to reduce the dimensionality of descriptors. Experiments on three standard texture datasets, Outex12, Outex10 and KTH-TIPS2, are conducted to evaluate the performance of AGLBP. The results show that our proposed descriptor gets better performance comparing to some state-of-the-art rotation texture descriptors in texture classification.
Texture classification is an important and challenging problem in many image processing applications. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieved significant successes for image classification, texture classification remains a difficult problem since textures usually do not contain enough information regarding the shape of object. In image processing, texture classification has been traditionally studied well with spectral analyses which exploit repeated structures in many textures. Since CNNs process images as-is in the spatial domain whereas spectral analyses process images in the frequency domain, these models have different characteristics in terms of performance. We propose a novel CNN architecture, wavelet CNNs, which integrates a spectral analysis into CNNs. Our insight is that the pooling layer and the convolution layer can be viewed as a limited form of a spectral analysis. Based on this insight, we generalize both layers to perform a spectral analysis with wavelet transform. Wavelet CNNs allow us to utilize spectral information which is lost in conventional CNNs but useful in texture classification. The experiments demonstrate that our model achieves better accuracy in texture classification than existing models. We also show that our model has significantly fewer parameters than CNNs, making our model easier to train with less memory.
This paper presents a novel application to detect counterfeit identity documents forged by a scan-printing operation. Texture analysis approaches are proposed to extract validation features from security background that is usually printed in documents as IDs or banknotes. The main contribution of this work is the end-to-end mobile-server architecture, which provides a service for non-expert users and therefore can be used in several scenarios. The system also provides a crowdsourcing mode so labeled images can be gathered, generating databases for incremental training of the algorithms.
Scattering Transforms (or ScatterNets) introduced by Mallat are a promising start into creating a well-defined feature extractor to use for pattern recognition and image classification tasks. They are of particular interest due to their architectural similarity to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), while requiring no parameter learning and still performing very well (particularly in constrained classification tasks). In this paper we visualize what the deeper layers of a ScatterNet are sensitive to using a 'DeScatterNet'. We show that the higher orders of ScatterNets are sensitive to complex, edge-like patterns (checker-boards and rippled edges). These complex patterns may be useful for texture classification, but are quite dissimilar from the patterns visualized in second and third layers of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) - the current state of the art Image Classifiers. We propose that this may be the source of the current gaps in performance between ScatterNets and CNNs (83% vs 93% on CIFAR-10 for ScatterNet+SVM vs ResNet). We then use these visualization tools to propose possible enhancements to the ScatterNet design, which show they have the power to extract features more closely resembling CNNs, while still being well-defined and having the invariance properties fundamental to ScatterNets.
Texture analysis is a well-known research topic in computer vision and image processing and has many applications. Gradient-based texture methods have become popular in classification problems. For the first time we extend a well-known gradient-based method, Co-occurrence Histograms of Oriented Gradients (CoHOG) to extract texture features from 2D Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). Unlike the original CoHOG method, we use the whole image instead of sub-regions for feature calculation. Also, we use a larger neighborhood size. Gradient orientations of the image pixels are calculated using Sobel, Gaussian Derivative (GD) and Local Frequency Descriptor Gradient (LFDG) operators. The extracted feature vector size is very large and classification using a large number of similar features does not provide the best results. In our proposed method, for the first time to our best knowledge, only a minimum number of significant features are selected using area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) thresholds with <= 0.01. In this paper, we apply the proposed method to classify Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients from the controls. It is observed that selected texture features from downsampled images are significantly different between patients and controls. These features are used in a linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier to determine the classification accuracy. Optimal sensitivity and specificity are also calculated. Three different cohort datasets are used in the experiments. The performance of the proposed method using three gradient operators and two different neighborhood sizes is analyzed. Region based analysis is performed to demonstrate that significant changes between patients and controls are limited to the motor cortex.
It is well accepted that convolutional neural networks play an important role in learning excellent features for image classification and recognition. However, in tradition they only allow adjacent layers connected, limiting integration of multi-scale information. To further improve their performance, we present a concatenating framework of shortcut convolutional neural networks. This framework can concatenate multi-scale features by shortcut connections to the fully-connected layer that is directly fed to the output layer. We do a large number of experiments to investigate performance of the shortcut convolutional neural networks on many benchmark visual datasets for different tasks. The datasets include AR, FERET, FaceScrub, CelebA for gender classification, CUReT for texture classification, MNIST for digit recognition, and CIFAR-10 for object recognition. Experimental results show that the shortcut convolutional neural networks can achieve better results than the traditional ones on these tasks, with more stability in different settings of pooling schemes, activation functions, optimizations, initializations, kernel numbers and kernel sizes.
Topological data analysis (TDA) has emerged as one of the most promising techniques to reconstruct the unknown shapes of high-dimensional spaces from observed data samples. TDA, thus, yields key shape descriptors in the form of persistent topological features that can be used for any supervised or unsupervised learning task, including multi-way classification. Sparse sampling, on the other hand, provides a highly efficient technique to reconstruct signals in the spatial-temporal domain from just a few carefully-chosen samples. Here, we present a new method, referred to as the Sparse-TDA algorithm, that combines favorable aspects of the two techniques. This combination is realized by selecting an optimal set of sparse pixel samples from the persistent features generated by a vector-based TDA algorithm. These sparse samples are selected from a low-rank matrix representation of persistent features using QR pivoting. We show that the Sparse-TDA method demonstrates promising performance on three benchmark problems related to human posture recognition and image texture classification.
Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is a traditional descriptor for texture analysis that gained attention in the last decade. Being robust to several properties such as invariance to illumination translation and scaling, LBPs achieved state-of-the-art results in several applications. However, LBPs are not able to capture high-level features from the image, merely encoding features with low abstraction levels. In this work, we propose Deep LBP, which borrow ideas from the deep learning community to improve LBP expressiveness. By using parametrized data-driven LBP, we enable successive applications of the LBP operators with increasing abstraction levels. We validate the relevance of the proposed idea in several datasets from a wide range of applications. Deep LBP improved the performance of traditional and multiscale LBP in all cases.
Methods based on local image features have recently shown promise for texture classification tasks, especially in the presence of large intra-class variation due to illumination, scale, and viewpoint changes. Inspired by the theories of image structure analysis, this paper presents a simple, efficient, yet robust descriptor namely local jet pattern (LJP) for texture classification. In this approach, a jet space representation of a texture image is derived from a set of derivatives of Gaussian (DtGs) filter responses up to second order, so called local jet vectors (LJV), which also satisfy the Scale Space properties. The LJP is obtained by utilizing the relationship of center pixel with the local neighborhood information in jet space. Finally, the feature vector of a texture region is formed by concatenating the histogram of LJP for all elements of LJV. All DtGs responses up to second order together preserves the intrinsic local image structure, and achieves invariance to scale, rotation, and reflection. This allows us to develop a texture classification framework which is discriminative and robust. Extensive experiments on five standard texture image databases, employing nearest subspace classifier (NSC), the proposed descriptor achieves 100%, 99.92%, 99.75%, 99.16%, and 99.65% accuracy for Outex_TC-00010 (Outex_TC10), and Outex_TC-00012 (Outex_TC12), KTH-TIPS, Brodatz, CUReT, respectively, which are outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Inertial sensors are present in most mobile devices nowadays and such devices are used by people during most of their daily activities. In this paper, we present an approach for human activity recognition based on inertial sensors by employing recurrence plots (RP) and visual descriptors. The pipeline of the proposed approach is the following: compute RPs from sensor data, compute visual features from RPs and use them in a machine learning protocol. As RPs generate texture visual patterns, we transform the problem of sensor data classification to a problem of texture classification. Experiments for classifying human activities based on accelerometer data showed that the proposed approach obtains the highest accuracies, outperforming time- and frequency-domain features directly extracted from sensor data. The best results are obtained when using RGB RPs, in which each RGB channel corresponds to the RP of an independent accelerometer axis.
In this paper, we use a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) for the segmentation of gliomas from Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). A fully automatic, voxel based classification was achieved by training a 23 layer deep FCNN on 2-D slices extracted from patient volumes. The network was trained on slices extracted from 130 patients and validated on 50 patients. For the task of survival prediction, texture and shape based features were extracted from T1 post contrast volume to train an XGBoost regressor. On BraTS 2017 validation set, the proposed scheme achieved a mean whole tumor, tumor core and active dice score of 0.83, 0.69 and 0.69 respectively and an accuracy of 52% for the overall survival prediction.
Recently proposed robust 3D face alignment methods establish either dense or sparse correspondence between a 3D face model and a 2D facial image. The use of these methods presents new challenges as well as opportunities for facial texture analysis. In particular, by sampling the image using the fitted model, a facial UV can be created. Unfortunately, due to self-occlusion, such a UV map is always incomplete. In this paper, we propose a framework for training Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) to complete the facial UV map extracted from in-the-wild images. To this end, we first gather complete UV maps by fitting a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) to various multiview image and video datasets, as well as leveraging on a new 3D dataset with over 3,000 identities. Second, we devise a meticulously designed architecture that combines local and global adversarial DCNNs to learn an identity-preserving facial UV completion model. We demonstrate that by attaching the completed UV to the fitted mesh and generating instances of arbitrary poses, we can increase pose variations for training deep face recognition/verification models, and minimise pose discrepancy during testing, which lead to better performance. Experiments on both controlled and in-the-wild UV datasets prove the effectiveness of our adversarial UV completion model. We achieve state-of-the-art verification accuracy, $94.05\%$, under the CFP frontal-profile protocol only by combining pose augmentation during training and pose discrepancy reduction during testing. We will release the first in-the-wild UV dataset (we refer as WildUV) that comprises of complete facial UV maps from 1,892 identities for research purposes.
In this paper we propose a novel texture descriptor called Fractal Weighted Local Binary Pattern (FWLBP). The fractal dimension (FD) measure is relatively invariant to scale-changes, and presents a good correlation with human viewpoint of surface roughness. We have utilized this property to construct a scale-invariant descriptor. Here, the input image is sampled using an augmented form of the local binary pattern (LBP) over three different radii, and then used an indexing operation to assign FD weights to the collected samples. The final histogram of the descriptor has its features calculated using LBP, and its weights computed from the FD image. The proposed descriptor is scale invariant, and is also robust in rotation or reflection, and partially tolerant to noise and illumination changes. In addition, the local fractal dimension is relatively insensitive to the bi-Lipschitz transformations, whereas its extension is adequate to precisely discriminate the fundamental of texture primitives. Experiment results carried out on standard texture databases show that the proposed descriptor achieved better classification rates compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors.