Structural Texture Segmentation using Affine Symmetry

Many natural textures comprise structural patterns and show strong self-similarity. We use affine symmetry to segment an image into self-similar regions; that is a patch of texture (blocks from a uniformly partitioned image) can be transformed to other similar patches by warping. If the texture image contains multiple regions, we then cluster patches into a number of classes such that the overall warping error is minimized. Discovering the optimal clusters is not trivial and known methods are computationally intensive due to the affine transformation. We demonstrate efficient segmentation of structural textures without affine computation. The algorithm uses Fourier Slice Analysis to obtain a spectral contour signature. Experimental evaluation on structural textures shows encouraging results and application on natural images demonstrates identification of texture objects.