GLIBP: Gradual Locality Integration of Binary Patterns for Scene Images Retrieval

We propose an enhanced version of the local binary pattern (LBP) operator for texture extraction in images in the context of image retrieval. The novelty of our proposal is based on the observation that the LBP exploits only the lowest kind of local information through the global histogram. However, such global Histograms reflect only the statistical distribution of the various LBP codes in the image. The block based LBP, which uses local histograms of the LBP, was one of few tentative to catch higher level textural information. We believe that important local and useful information in between the two levels is just ignored by the two schemas. The newly developed method: gradual locality integration of binary patterns (GLIBP) is a novel attempt to catch as much local information as possible, in a gradual fashion. Indeed, GLIBP aggregates the texture features present in grayscale images extracted by LBP through a complex structure. The used framework is comprised of a multitude of ellipse-shaped regions that are arranged in circular-concentric forms of increasing size. The framework of ellipses is in fact derived from a simple parameterized generator. In addition, the elliptic forms allow targeting texture directionality, which is a very useful property in texture characterization. In addition, the general framework of ellipses allows for taking into account the spatial information (specifically rotation). The effectiveness of GLIBP was investigated on the Corel-1K (Wang) dataset. It was also compared to published works including the very effective DLEP. Results show significant higher or comparable performance of GLIBP with regard to the other methods, which qualifies it as a good tool for scene images retrieval.