Texture Characterization Using Shape Co-Occurrence Patterns

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 a 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 relationships among the shapes in the tree are learned as codewords. Three different coding methods are investigated for learning the codewords, which can be used to encode any given texture image into a descriptive vector. In contrast with existing works, the proposed approach not only inherits the shape-based method's strong ability to capture geometrical aspects of textures and high robustness to variations in imaging conditions but also provides a flexible way to consider shape relationships and to compute high-order statistics on the tree. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that co-occurrence patterns of explicit shapes have been used as a tool for texture analysis. Experiments on various texture and scene data sets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.