Statistical binary patterns for rotational invariant texture classification

A new texture representation framework called statistical binary patterns (SBPs) is presented. It consists in applying rotation invariant local binary pattern operators (LBPriu2) to a series of moment images, defined by local statistics uniformly computed using a given spatial support. It can be seen as a generalisation of the commonly used complementation approach (CLBP), since it extends the local description not only to local contrast information, but also to higher order local variations. In short, SBPs aim at expanding LBP self-similarity operator from the local grey level to the regional distribution level. Thanks to a richer local description, the SBPs have better discrimination power than other LBP variants. Furthermore, thanks to the regularisation effect of the statistical moments, the SBP descriptors show better noise robustness than classical CLBPs. The interest of the approach is validated through a large experimental study performed on five texture databases: KTH-TIPS, KTH-TIPS 2b, CUReT, UIUC and DTD. The results show that, for the four first datasets, the SBPs are comparable or outperform the recent state-of-the-art methods, even using small support for the LBP operator, and using limited size spatial support for the computation of the local statistics. •We extend the binary patterns from the pixel level to the local distribution level.•We exploit moment images calculated from spatial support of the statistics.•Statistical moments clearly improve the expressiveness and robustness of descriptor.