Texture classification via patch-based sparse texton learning

Texture classification is a classical yet still active topic in computer vision and pattern recognition. Recently, several new texture classification approaches by modeling texture images as distributions over a set of textons have been proposed. These textons are learned as the cluster centers in the image patch feature space using the K-means clustering algorithm. However, the Euclidian distance based the K-means clustering process may not be able to well characterize the intrinsic feature space of texture textons, which if often embedded into a low dimensional manifold. Inspired by the great success of l₁-norm minimization based sparse representation (SR), in this paper we propose a novel texture classification method via patch-based sparse texton learning. Specifically, the dictionary of textons is learned by applying SR to image patches in the training dataset. The SR coefficients of the test images over the dictionary are used to construct the histograms for texture classification. Experimental results on benchmark database validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.