The analysis of natural textures using run length features

A family of texture features is presented that have the ability to discriminate different textures in a 3-D scene as well as the ability to recover the range and orientation of the surfaces of the scene. These texture features are derived from the gray-level run-length matrices (GLRLMs) of an image. The GLRLMs are first normalized so that they all have equal average gray-level run length. Features extracted from the normalized GLRLMs are independent of the surface geometry. These features can be used in three-dimensional scene analysis where textures need to be identified according to their differences. Based on the average-run-length information and the classification results, surface range as well as surface orientation of a textured surface can be recovered