Color Texture Classification Using Shortest Paths in Graphs

Color textures are among the most important visual attributes in image analysis. This paper presents a novel method to analyze color textures by modeling a color image as a graph in two different and complementary manners (each color channel separately and the three color channels altogether) and by obtaining statistical moments from the shortest paths between specific vertices of this graph. Such an approach allows to create a set of feature vectors, which were extracted from VisTex, USPTex, and TC00013 color texture databases. The best classification results were 99.07%, 96.85%, and 91.54% (LDA with leave-one-out), 87.62%, 66.71%, and 88.06% (1NN with holdout), and 98.62%, 96.16%, and 91.34% (LDA with holdout) of success rate (percentage of samples correctly classified) for these three databases, respectively. These results prove that the proposed approach is a powerful tool for color texture analysis to be explored.