Gray Scale and Rotation Invariant Texture Classification with Local Binary Patterns

This paper presents a theoretically very simple yet efficient approach for gray scale and rotation invariant texture classification based on local binary patterns and nonparametric discrimination of sample and prototype distributions. The proposed approach is very robust in terms of gray scale variations, since the operators are by definition invariant against any monotonic transformation of the gray scale. Another advantage is computational simplicity, as the operators can be realized with a few operations in a small neighborhood and a lookup table. Excellent experimental results obtained in two true problems of rotation invariance, where the classifier is trained at one particular rotation angle and tested with samples from other rotation angles, demonstrate that good discrimination can be achieved with the statistics of simple rotation invariant local binary patterns. These operators characterize the spatial configuration of local image texture and the performance can be further improved by combining them with rotation invariant variance measures that characterize the contrast of local image texture. The joint distributions of these orthogonal measures are shown to be very powerful tools for rotation invariant texture analysis.