Using association rules as texture features

A new type of texture feature based on association rules is proposed in this paper. Association rules have been used in applications such as market basket analysis to capture relationships present among items in large data sets. It is shown that association rules can be adapted to capture frequently occurring local structures in images. Association rules capture both structural and statistical information, and automatically identifies the structures that occur most frequently and relationships that have significant discriminative power. Methods for classification and segmentation of textured images using association rules as texture features are described. Simulation results using images consisting of man made and natural textures show that association rule features perform well compared to other widely used texture features. It is shown that association rule features can distinguish texture pairs with identical first, second, and third order statistics, and texture pairs that are not easily discriminable visually.