Perception-Aware Texture Similarity Prediction

Texture similarity plays important roles in texture analysis and material recognition. However, perceptually-consistent fine-grained texture similarity prediction is still challenging. The discrepancy between the texture similarity data obtained using algorithms and human visual perception has been demonstrated. This dilemma is normally attributed to the texture representation and similarity metric utilised by the algorithms, which are inconsistent with human perception. To address this challenge, we introduce a Perception-Aware Texture Similarity Prediction Network (PATSP-Net). This network comprises a Bilinear Lateral Attention Transformer network (BiLAViT) and a novel loss function, namely, RSLoss. The BiLAViT contains a Siamese Feature Extraction Subnetwork (SFEN) and a Metric Learning Subnetwork (MLN), designed on top of the mechanisms of human perception. On the other hand, the RSLoss measures both the ranking and the scaling differences. To our knowledge, either the BiLAViT or the RSLoss has not been explored for texture similarity tasks. The PATSP-Net performs better than, or at least comparably to, its counterparts on three data sets for different fine-grained texture similarity prediction tasks. We believe that this promising result should be due to the joint utilization of the BiLAViT and RSLoss, which is able to learn the perception-aware texture representation and similarity metric.