Dynamic texture recognition based on distributions of spacetime oriented structure

This paper addresses the challenge of recognizing dynamic textures based on their observed visual dynamics. Typically, the term dynamic texture is used with reference to image sequences of various natural processes that exhibit stochastic dynamics (e.g., smoke, water and windblown vegetation); although, it applies equally well to images of simpler dynamics when analyzed in terms of aggregate region properties (e.g., uniform motion of elements in traffic video). In this paper, a novel approach to dynamic texture representation and an associated recognition method are proposed. The approach pursued here recognizes dynamic textures based on matching distributions (histograms) of spacetime orientation structure. Empirical evaluation on a standard database with controls to remove the effects of identical viewpoint demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves superior performance over alternative state-of-the-art methods.