LYCANS 2K14

One Day International Conference On Research Vogues in Inventive Engineering

SATYAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY, 26th FEBRUARY 2014

Performance Evaluation of Different Texture Models

for Texture Segmentation
G. Madasamy Raja

Dr.V.Sadasivam

Associate Professor, Department of IT,

PET Engineering College, Vallioor,
Tirunelveli District, Tamilnadu 627 117, India.
anushpriya2004@yahoo.com

Principal, PSN College of Engineering & Technology,

Tirunelveli, Tirunelveli District.
Tamilnadu-627152, India.

Abstract Texture segmentation is one of the important and

useful applications in image processing activities. Texture
segmentation is a useful task in various pattern recognition
related works. In the past, so many texture models have been
presented but the problem remains challenging in the feature
extraction and similarity measurement. This paper studies the
performance of some conventional texture measures namely
Texture Spectrum and Local Binary Patterns which have been
successfully used in various applications and of some new
promising approaches proposed recently namely Local Ternary
Patterns and Optimized Local Ternary Patterns. All these texture
models are applied in texture segmentation methods on different
image sets that are selected from the standard Brodatz texture
database. Experimental results are then analyzed in order to
evaluate texture segmentation performance of the above
mentioned texture models based upon the segmentation accuracy
and execution time.
Index Terms Kullback leibler distance, Texture spectrum
(TS), Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Local Ternary Patterns
(LTP), Texture Segmentation, Optimized Local Ternary Patterns
(OLTP).

I. INTRODUCTION
Texture segmentation is one method among different
texture analysis approaches for pattern recognition tasks. This
paper evaluates the texture segmentation performance of some
texture models which have been successfully applied in various
texture related applications and of some newly introduced
approaches by using two popular benchmarks namely
segmentation accuracy and execution time. Texture
segmentation evaluation is not a new area of work, however
previous work has either compared too few algorithms or used
very small number of test images that makes it difficult to
come to a conclusion about the accuracy of results [1]. Texture
methods can broadly be classified into statistical, geometrical,
structural, model-based and signal processing feature based
methods [2]. A research report about many texture methods and
their performances on image segmentation has been presented
by du Buf et al. [3]. Madasu Hanmandlu et al. [4] have
presented a detailed survey of the various texture segmentation
methods used in image analysis. Zhang and Tan [5] have also

done research about these types of surveys and gave useful

results. Spatial texture methods and frequency texture methods
were compared for image segmentation specifically to the
medical images by Vautrot et al. [6] as well as by Yi-hui Liu et
al. [7]. Various texture methods were tested for content based
image retrieval by Selvarajah et al. [8].
II. TEXTURE MEASURES USED IN THIS STUDY
A. Texture Spectrum
The Texture Spectrum method was first developed by He
and Wang [9] and later extended for many applications [10].
The texture spectrum method is based on the calculation of the
relative intensity relations between the pixels in a small
neighborhood and not on their absolute intensity values. The
texture spectrum which characterizes the original image with
the help of images texture characteristics will be the result
after the application of the texture spectrum methodology to a
given digital image. Texture Spectrum method uses a basic
concept called Texture Unit which is characterized by eight
pixels each of which has one of three possible values (0,1,2)
obtained from a neighborhood of 3*3 pixels. If the intensity
value of the central pixel is considered as X0 and the intensity
value of each neighboring pixel as Xi, the set that is considered
as the smallest complete unit of the under consideration image
is:
TU = {X0, X1, X2, , X8} where

0 if X i X 0

Ei 1 if Xi X 0 for i 1, 2, . .8. (1)

E = The i element of texture unit set TU = {E , E ,E }.
2 if Xi X 0

From the above formula, each element can be assigned one of

i

th

the three possible values and so the total number of possible

texture units for the 3*3 pixel elements will be 3 8 = 6561. In
the texture spectrum method, the eight elements can be ordered

LYCANS 2K14
One Day International Conference On Research Vogues in Inventive Engineering
SATYAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY, 26th FEBRUARY 2014
differently. If the eight elements are ordered clockwise as
shown in Fig. 1, the first element may take eight possible
positions from the top left (a) to the middle left (h) and then the
6561 texture units can be labeled by the following formula,

Fig. 2. Transforming a neighborhood into a texture unit.

N TU Ei * 3i1

(2)

i 1

where NTU is the texture unit number. Fig. 2 gives an example

for the procedure of transforming 3x3 local neighborhood
pixels into a texture unit.
B. Local Binary Patterns (LBP)
As the Texture spectrum method uses very large number of
patterns, another texture model namely Local Binary Patterns
(LBP) operator was introduced by Ojala et al. [11] which was
again based on a 3x3 neighborhood. It also operated with eight
neighboring pixels using the center as a threshold. The final
LBP code was then produced by multiplying the threshold
values by weights given by powers of two and concatenating
the results binomially which results in a pattern. This process is
shown in Fig. 3.
The following equation (3) is being followed to describe
the texture structure in a larger scale. The LBP for the texture
neighborhood with P neighbors and R radius is characterized
by
P-1
LBPP,R = u(ti tc)2i
i=0

(3)

where tc is the intensity of the center pixel, ti is the intensity of

the neighborhood i, and u(x) is the step function. P represents
angular resolution and R represents spatial resolution in the
above equation (3). The LBP P,R operator produces 2P different
patterns. So, for a 3x3 neighborhood a total of 256 (2 8)
different LBP pattern strings can be generated. An entire
image can be represented by a pattern spectrum of 256
elements, which can be used as the texture descriptor.
a b c
h
d
g f

Fig. 1. Eight clockwise, successive ordering ways of the 8 elements of the

texture unit.

Fig. 3. An example of LBP computation.

C. Local Ternary Patterns (LTP)

We know that LBP is susceptible to noise particularly in the
more uniform image regions. So, a 3-valued pattern instead of
2-valued LBP namely Local Ternary Patterns (LTP) was
introduced by Tan and Triggs [12]. When a 3x3 neighborhood
around a centre pixel in an image is considered, the LTP
operator takes the form
8

LTP 3n s(i n i c ),
n 1

and

- 1 if u i c t ,

s(u) 0 if i c t u i c t ,
1 if u i t ,
c

(4)

where t is a user-defined threshold, n is the number of

neighboring pixels surrounding the center pixel c, i c is the pixel
value of c and in are the pixel values of n. In LTP, the difference
between the centre pixel and neighboring pixel is encoded by
three values (1,0,-1) according to a predefined and fixed
threshold t. But in LTP, one of the major problem is length of
the pattern histogram which is very high (3 8). To reduce the
dimension of the pattern histogram, the ternary pattern is
converted into binary pattern, by splitting it into its positive
and negative parts. Two different spectrums were calculated for
both positive and negative components and then the results are
concatenated.
D. Optimized Local Ternary Patterns (OLTP)
In OLTP, a texture image can be decomposed into a set of
small units called patterns. As the texture model OLTP uses
only optimal patterns (selected and useful patterns), the length

LYCANS 2K14
One Day International Conference On Research Vogues in Inventive Engineering
SATYAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY, 26th FEBRUARY 2014
of the pattern histogram is maintained as optimum and
minimum compared to other texture models. In OLTP, a
pattern is represented by eight elements, each of which has
one of three possible values (0,1,5) that are obtained from a
neighborhood of 3x3 pixels. Let ic, i1, i2, ,i8 be the pixel
values of a local 3x3 neighborhood region, where ic is the value
of the central pixel and i1, i2, ,i8 are the pixel values of its 8
neighbors. The following equation (5) defines the process for
converting a local 3x3 neighborhood into its pattern
representation (P),

(a)

(b)
1

Fig.4. Example of
neighborhood to a
string in OLTP

(c)
0

0 pattern
5 texture model.

transforming a 3x3

0
1

(a) 3x3 Local Region (b) Pattern Matrix (c) Pattern String

0 if i n (1 )i c

P(i c , i n ) 1 if (1 )i c i n (1 )i c (5)
5 if i (1 )i
n
c

where is a small scaling factor and it is assigned as 0.05.

Figure 4 shows an example of transforming a sample 3x3 local
neighborhood into a pattern unit by using equation (5). For a
3x3 local neighborhood region, the total number of different
pattern strings will be 6561(38). So, a complete texture image
can be described by a pattern histogram of 6561 bins that
represents the occurrence frequency of pattern strings over the
texture image.
Further, after many reliable experiments, it is observed that
for a 3x3 local neighborhood of a texture image, only few
pattern strings among these 6561 different pattern strings, are
frequently occurring patterns and all other pattern strings are not
so. As per the literature, frequently occurring patterns are the
reasons for textural aspects and it is meaningless to allot
separate bins in the patterns histogram for all the frequently
occurring and rarely occurring patterns because it may end in
wastage of memory and wastage of time. Moreover, the analysis
of these frequently occurring pattern strings found that all these
pattern strings have uniform circular structure and they are
rotation invariant. To identify these frequently occurring pattern
strings which are rotation invariant, let us consider, a uniformity
measure U which corresponds to the number of spatial
transitions circularly among the sub patterns in the pattern
strings. The uniformity measure U is defined as

For example, the pattern string 11111111 has U value of 0, the

pattern string 00000055 has U value of 2 and the pattern string
55501111 has U value of 3. Uniform Patterns are designated
as those patterns with U value of less than or equal to three
and totally there are 45 number of uniform patterns available.
The new idea Transition Length () among the uniform pattern
strings and the introduction of a new concept called Level of
Optimality (Lopt) have further reduced the number of uniform
patterns into 24 number of optimal patterns.
The elements of the uniform pattern strings are either 0 or
1 or 5 or any combinations of these values. If the number of
occurrences (cardinality) of 0, 1 and 5 are represented by
Card(0), Card(1) and Card(5) respectively, then the level of
optimality for a particular uniform pattern string can be
computed as,

L opt

1 min Card(0), Card(1), Card(5)

max

where refers to the transition length among the sub patterns

in the uniform pattern strings. Table 1 contains the transition
lengths of various sub patterns that are available in the
uniform pattern strings.
Optimized Local Ternary Patterns (OLTP) texture model
that uses only optimal set of uniform patterns to represent a
local image texture is defined as:

U F(P(i c , i1 ), P(i c , i 8 )) F(P(i c , i n ), P(i c , i n 1 ))

n 2

1 if | A B | 0
where F(A,B) =
0 otherwise

10005510

P(i , i

OLTP

i 1

25

(6)

(7)

) if U 3 and L opt 2
otherwise

(8)
This recently proposed texture model, OLTP [13] uses only 24
unique optimal patterns for texture representation and it groups
all other patterns under one label 25 which are termed as suboptimal patterns. Therefore the dimension
25 17
168 of pattern spectrum has been reduced from
2
2
15 25
108
6
6
24 38
332
4
0
3

LYCANS 2K14
One Day International Conference On Research Vogues in Inventive Engineering
SATYAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY, 26th FEBRUARY 2014
6561 to 25, that too with optimal set of patterns. The occurrence
frequency of all the optimal patterns over a whole texture image
is termed as OLTP Pattern Spectrum or OLTP Pattern
Histogram, which describes the texture information of the
corresponding image.
III. TEXTURE SEGMENTATION
In order to evaluate the performance of the texture models
in the process of texture segmentation, nine texture images
with the size of 256 x 256 pixels have been selected from the
image set of Brodatzs natural images [14] and Figure 5 shows
all the selected images. These images were selected because
they are broadly similar to one another and also that they
resemble parts of remotely sensed images. A supervised
segmentation method was followed over the selected nine
texture images of Fig. 5. The kullbak-leibler distance was used
as the similarity measure and the difference between two
pattern spectrums was considered as the difference between
two texture classes. The supervised segmentation method is
followed and the following steps show the procedure of the
segmentation algorithm.
Step 1. Read the texture mosaic image.
Step 2. Select randomly a sample sub image of 30x30
pixels from the texture image as sample image.
Step 3. Transfer the 30x30 sub image into the OLTP
texture model and obtain the OLTP spectrum for
the selected sub image.
Step 4. Select one sample sub image for each selected
texture image and repeat step 1 to step3 for all
the selected texture sub images.
Step 5. Select a window size of 30x30 pixels starting

TABLE I.

DETAILS OF THE TRANSITION LENGTH () FOR THE SUB

PATTERNS OF UNIFORM PATTERN STRINGS

Transition Length
Sub Pattern
Transition Length ()
type

S.N
o
1

01

10

15

51

05

50

015

510

105

10

150

11

051

12

501

(a)

(b)

(c)

from the top-left corner of the test image and do

Step 6.

step3 for the selected window.

Calculate Kullback-Leibler distance (D) between

the OLTP spectrum of the selected window

obtained from step 5 and the results of step 4.
Step 7. The central pixel of the window considered in
step5 will be assigned to a particular texture class
sample, for which the D (obtained from
step 6) is the minimum among all the samples.
Step 8. Repeat step 5 through step 7 for all the windows
which are selected in size 30x30 pixels starting
from the top-left corner of the given test image
with a step of two pixels in the row and column
directions.

(d)

(g)

(e)

(h)

(f)

(i)

Fig. 5: The Brodatz texture images used in the segmentation

experiments
a) pressed calf leather b) brick wall c) straw matting
d) loose burlap e) water f) french canvas g) reptile skin
h) herringbone weave i ) raffia

LYCANS 2K14
One Day International Conference On Research Vogues in Inventive Engineering
SATYAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY, 26th FEBRUARY 2014
sensibly fine segmentation result (Fig. 7(h)) with some minor
errors especially around texture boundaries.
Input texture image

Sub image
(30x30) block

Transfer into OLTP texture

model

(a)

(e)

(b)

(f)

Image Segmentation

Segmented Texture

Fig. 6. Texture segmentation algorithm.

The steps involved in the process of supervised texture

segmentation algorithm are shown in Fig. 6. The supervised
segmentation results of the images with execution time are
shown in section IV.

(c)

(g)

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 7 shows some segmentation results of OLTP texture
model for the segmentation algorithm which was shown in the
Fig. 6. The left column of Fig. 7(Fig. 7(a)-(d)) shows the test
images of the experiments and the results of the segmentation
are shown in the right column of Fig. 7(Fig. 7(e)-(h)). The
segmentation results are displayed in grey level images, where
different textures are shown in different grey levels. All the
results of Fig. 7 (Fig. 7(e)-(h)) consist of good segmentation
results with correctly identified number of textures as well. The
two texture mosaic image of Fig. 7(a) consists of textures
pressed calf leather and brick wall. The two-texture mosaic
image of Fig. 7(b) consists of textures reptile skin and straw
matting. The two-texture mosaic image of Fig. 7(c) consists of
textures herring bone weave and brick wall. Result images of
Fig. 7(e), 7(f) and 7(g) are the segmentation results of input
images Fig. 7(a), 7(b) and 7(c) respectively. In these result
images, the OLTP texture model successfully differentiates the
two textured regions and detects the boundary between them in
a fair manner. The four-texture mosaic image Fig. 7(d) consists
of textures herring bone weave, french canvas, pressed calf
leather and brick wall. The OLTP texture model gives a

(d)

(h)

Fig. 7. Supervised texture segmentation results when OLTP

texture model is used. 7(a) 7(d) various multitextured images
stitched from the selected texture images and 7(e)-7(h) shows
the corresponding segmented output when OLTP texture model
is used.

Table 2 shows the segmentation accuracy results for the

input images which are shown in Fig. 5 for the various texture
methods. As far as the segmentation accuracy is considered as
seen from table 2, it is concluded that the most excellent
performance was achieved by the texture model OLTP
followed by LTP. The performance of LBP was the poorest.
The texture method TS did not perform well compared to LTP
and OLTP. In the case of LTP texture model, 92 percent
average segmentation accuracy is achieved where as in the case
of OLTP 94.10 percent average segmentation accuracy was

LYCANS 2K14
One Day International Conference On Research Vogues in Inventive Engineering
SATYAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY, 26th FEBRUARY 2014
received which is the upper limit in these experiments. The
valid reason for this success is LTP uses permanent threshold
TABLE 2: TEXTURE SEGMENTATION ACCURACY RESULTS

Image
Name
pressed calf
leather
brick wall
straw
matting
loose burlap
water
french
canvas
reptile skin
herringbone
weave
raffia

TS

LBP

LTP

OLTP

93.52

90.51

95.08

98.99

90.06

87.35

94.53

97.00

83.32

82.22

92.01

92.96

89.94
91.97

88.56
88.56

93.34
93.93

94.48
95.38

81.65

79.04

85.96

89.57

88.54

86.32

90.87

91.22

94.00

90.78

95.01

98.20

80.41

74.58

87.31

89.02

execution time for giving the result. As expected, in the case of

LBP, since this texture model uses 256 patterns it also took
more time than LTP and OLTP for giving the output. Though
both LTP and OLTP gave the result in more or less same time,
when the segmentation accuracy with execution time is
considered, OLTP results were better than LTP. Moreover, it is
clearly observed that OLTP outperforms all other selected
texture models in the process of texture segmentation because
it gave the best performance in both assessment factors namely
segmentation accuracy and execution time.
V. CONCLUSION
In all the above experiments, OLTP texture model that uses
only 24 unique optimal set of patterns, gave the superior
performance in both benchmark factors which is segmentation
accuracy and time complexity as shown in the results. As a
future expansion, this comparative study can be extended for
the process of texture segmentation with noise affected images
also. More over this study can be further continued by
including more texture measures as well as more texture
images. Further, this comparative analysis can be done with the
same algorithm but with different similarity measurement or
with the same similarity measurement but with different
segmentation algorithms for both texture image classification
as well as texture segmentation. This study uses the texture
images as it is but these images can be rotated as well for
further research to assess the quality of various texture models.
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Fig. 8. Computational cost (in seconds) for the selected four texture
models for the segmentation experiments

for finding the patterns in the texture where as OLTP uses

elastic threshold to find the pattern in the texture. Among the
four texture models under consideration, the recently proposed
OLTP texture model delivers superior performance with the
average segmentation accuracy of 94.10 percent. Figure 8
illustrates the average computational cost for the selected four
texture methods. Obviously as TS model is using very large
number of bins in the pattern histogram (6561), it took more

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LYCANS 2K14
One Day International Conference On Research Vogues in Inventive Engineering
SATYAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY, 26th FEBRUARY 2014
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