Illumination invariant and rotational insensitive textural representation

We propose an illumination invariant and rotation insensitive texture representation based on a Markovian textural model. A texture is aligned with its dominant orientation and textural features are derived from fast analytical estimates of Markovian statistics. We do not require any knowledge of illumination direction or spectrum. This makes our method suitable for computer analysis of real scenes, where appearance of materials depends on their orientation towards the illumination source. Our method is tested on the most realistic visual representation of natural materials - the bidirectional texture function (BTF), using data from the CUReT database, where it outperforms the alternative leading illumination invariant Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and texton MR8 methods, respectively.