LBCNIN: Local Binary Convolution Network with Intra-Class Normalization for Texture Recognition with Applications in Tactile Internet

Texture recognition is a pivotal task in computer vision, crucial for applications in material sciences, medicine, and agriculture. Leveraging advancements in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), researchers seek robust methods to discern intricate patterns in images. In the context of the burgeoning Tactile Internet (TI), efficient texture recognition algorithms are essential for real-time applications. This paper introduces a method named Local Binary Convolution Network with Intra-class Normalization (LBCNIN) for texture recognition. Incorporating features from the last layer of the backbone, LBCNIN employs a non-trainable Local Binary Convolution (LBC) layer, inspired by Local Binary Patterns (LBP), without fine-tuning the backbone. The encoded feature vector is fed into a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification, serving as the only trainable component. In the context of TI, the availability of images from multiple views, such as in 3D object semantic segmentation, allows for more data per object. Consequently, LBCNIN processes batches where each batch contains images from the same material class, with batch normalization employed as an intra-class normalization method, aiming to produce better results than single images. Comprehensive evaluations across texture benchmarks demonstrate LBCNIN's ability to achieve very good results under different resource constraints, attributed to the variability in backbone architectures.