Local Topographic Shape Patterns for Texture Description

This letter introduces a new image descriptor named Local Topographic Shape Pattern (LTSP) for texture description by relying on complete shape-based image representation. Firstly, a texture image is decomposed into a tree of shapes, i.e., topographic map, to obtain a multi-scale and contrast-invariant representation. Secondly, the shape of each node in the tree is handled with four shape patterns which are proposed as spatial codes of the shape. Finally, statistical histograms of shape patterns are used as texture descriptors. Contrast experiments of the proposed method show satisfactory performance in terms of both texture retrieval and classification tasks when applied to the Brodatz and UMD texture datasets.