Classifying image texture with statistical landscape features

This paper proposes to use three-dimensional information derived from the graph of an image function for texture description. The graph of an image function is a rumpled surface appearing like a landscape. To characterize the texture through this landscape, six novel texture feature curves based on the statistics of the geometrical and topological properties of the solids shaped by the graph and a variable horizontal plane are used. The proposed statistical landscape features have been shown by systematic experiments to offer very low error rates on a large subset of the Brodatz texture album having excluded some nonhomogeneous images, the entire Brodatz texture set, as well as the VisTex texture collection.