Local phase quantization descriptors for blur robust and illumination invariant recognition of color textures

A novel extension for color images of the local phase quantization (LPQ) local descriptor is presented. The descriptor is obtained by using a multivector representation of color values in order to derive blur-robust features in frequency domain. We tested the proposed descriptor in texture classification problems, and quantified its robustness for several amounts of blur. The experiments show that the proposed descriptor achieves superior accuracy over its grayscale counterpart and other color texture descriptors. Furthermore its illumination-invariance properties guarantee remarkable performances in challenging scenarios of varying illumination, without the need of preprocessing textures with color-constancy algorithms.