A texture descriptor for image retrieval and browsing

Image texture is an important visual primitive in image search and retrieval applications. To characterize texture information of images, a texture descriptor is proposed to capture both the perceptual information and the statistics of textures. The descriptor consists of two parts: a Perceptual Browsing Component (PBC) and a Similarity Retrieval Component (SRC). The emphasis of the paper is to introduce the extraction method for the PBC which is based on multidimensional decomposition of images using Gabor filters. By analyzing the one dimensional projections resulting from filtered images, PBC gives a quantitative measure about the structuredness of textures and also identifies the directionality and coarseness (scale). Our experimental results demonstrate that PBC can capture these texture properties quite well.