Edge Information for Boosting Discriminating Power of Texture Retrieval Techniques

Texture is a powerful image property for object and scene characterization, consequently, a large number of techniques has been developed for describing, classifying and retrieving texture images. On the other hand, edge information is proven to be an important cue used by the human visual system. Several physiological experiments have shown that, when looking at an object, human eyes explore different locations of that object through saccadic eye movements but they spend more time fixating edge regions. Based on this result, we hypothesize that a better performance could be obtained when analyzing an image (texture images in this case) if the visual features extracted from edge regions are given higher weights than those extracted from uniform regions. To check the validity of this hypothesis, we have modified several existing texture retrieval techniques in a way that incorporates the proposed idea and compared their performance with that of the original techniques. The results of the experiments that have been conducted on three common datasets confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach, since a significant improvement in the retrieval rate is obtained for all tested techniques. The experiments have also shown an improvement in the robustness to noise.