Unsupervised detection and localization of structural textures using projection profiles

The main goal of existing approaches for structural texture analysis has been the identification of repeating texture primitives and their placement patterns in images containing a single type of texture. We describe a novel unsupervised method for simultaneous detection and localization of multiple structural texture areas along with estimates of their orientations and scales in real images. First, multi-scale isotropic filters are used to enhance the potential texton locations. Then, regularity of the textons is quantified in terms of the periodicity of projection profiles of filter responses within sliding windows at multiple orientations. Next, a regularity index is computed for each pixel as the maximum regularity score together with its orientation and scale. Finally, thresholding of this regularity index produces accurate localization of structural textures in images containing different kinds of textures as well as non-textured areas. Experiments using three different data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed method in complex scenes. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.