αLBP - a novel member of the local binary pattern family based on α-cutting

Local binary pattern (LBP) descriptors have been popular in texture classification in recent years. They were introduced as descriptors of local image texture and their histograms are shown to be well performing texture features. In this paper we introduce two new LBP descriptors, αLBP and its improved variant IαLBP. We evaluate their performance in classification by comparing them with some of the existing LBP descriptors - LBP, ILBP, shift LBP (SLBP) and with one ternary descriptor - LTP. The texture descriptors are evaluated on three datasets - KTH-TIPS2b, UIUC and Virus texture dataset. The novel descriptor outperforms the other descriptors on two datasets, KTH-TIPS2b and Virus, and is tied for first place with ILBP on the UIUC dataset.