Application-independent feature selection for texture classification

Recent developments in texture classification have shown that the proper integration of texture methods from different families leads to significant improvements in terms of classification rate compared to the use of a single family of texture methods. In order to reduce the computational burden of that integration process, a selection stage is necessary. In general, a large number of feature selection techniques have been proposed. However, a specific texture feature selection must be typically applied given a particular set of texture patterns to be classified. This paper describes a new texture feature selection algorithm that is independent of specific classification problems/applications and thus must only be run once given a set of available texture methods. The proposed application-independent selection scheme has been evaluated and compared to previous proposals on both Brodatz compositions and complex real images. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.