Multi-Scale Boosting Feature Encoding Network for Texture Recognition

Texture recognition remains a challenging visual task due to the complex appearance variations caused by scale changes in the real world. In most existing texture recognition methods, textures are represented at a single scale; thus, multi-scale texture information is not fully utilized, resulting in insufficient representation and inaccurate recognition. In this study, with the goal of addressing the challenge of scale changes, we propose a novel multi-scale boosting feature encoding network (MSBFEN) for accurate texture recognition. MSBFEN first extracts multi-scale features with multi-scale texture structure information under the guidance of texture priors using a novel prior-guided feature extraction (PFE) method. Then, a multi-scale texture encoding (MSTE) method is devised to capture discriminative multi-scale texture representations by encoding the extracted features. Finally, to fully utilize the multi-scale texture representations for accurate texture recognition, a novel multi-scale boosting learning (MSBL) method is proposed. In MSBL, the learning procedure for multi-scale texture recognition is boosted in a hierarchical, progressively reinforced manner, significantly addressing the challenge of scale changes and greatly enhancing the recognition accuracy. In addition, a novel outlier-aware texture encoding (OTE) method is proposed for robust texture encoding at each scale of MSTE. OTE can resist the influence of background interference and can further enhance the robustness of MSBFEN. In extensive experiments conducted on six challenging texture recognition datasets, namely, KTH-TIPS2b, FMD, DTD, MINC, GTOS and GTOS-mobile, MSBFEN achieves accuracies of 86.2%, 86.4%, 77.8%, 85.3%, 86.4% and 87.57%, respectively, representing state-of-the-art texture recognition performance.