A Genetic Programming Method for Scale-Invariant Texture Classification

Abstract

Texture offers an effective characterization of image shape and orientation. Thus, a predominant task is to detect and extract texture features that discriminate accurately images within different semantic classes. The challenge resides in making these features invariant to several changes, such as affine transformation and viewpoint change, in order to ensure their robustness. Besides, the training phase requires a large number of images. To deal with these issues, Genetic Programming (GP) is adopted in this work with the intention of classifying precisely texture images using some training images per class. In fact, in order to automatically generate a descriptor that is invariant to illumination, rotation and scale; the proposed method combines GP with the scale extraction technique involved by SIFT. The performance of the proposed method is validated on five challenging datasets of non-scaled as well as scaled texture images. Results show that the method is robust not only to scale but also to rotation, while achieving significant performance compared to the state of the art methods.