Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new descriptor of texture im- ages based on the characterization of the spatial patterns of image key- points. Regarding the set of visual keypoints of a given texture sample as the realization of marked point process, we define texture features from multivariate spatial statistics. Our approach initially relies on the construction of a codebook of the visual signatures of the keypoints. Here these visual signatures are given by SIFT feature vectors and the codebooks are issued from a hierarchical clustering algorithm suitable for processing large high-dimensional dataset. The texture descriptor is formed by cooccurrence statistics of neighboring keypoint pairs for differ- ent neighborhood radii. The proposed descriptor inherits the invariance properties of the SIFT w.r.t. contrast change and geometric image trans- formation (rotation, scaling). An application to texture recognition using the discriminative classifiers, namely: k-NN, SVM and random forest, is considered and a quantitative evaluation is reported for two case-studies: UIUC texture database and real sonar textures. The proposed approach favourably compares to previous work. We further discuss the properties of the proposed descriptor, including dimensionality aspects.