US 6,192,150 B1Granted

Invariant texture matching method for image retrieval

AssigneeNational University of Singapore

InventorsWee Kheng Leow, Seow Yong Lai

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Abstract

A method and apparatus matches texture patterns in a way that is invariant to the intensities, scales, and orientations of the texture patterns. The texture matching apparatus includes a texture feature extractor, a feature transformer, and an image ranker. The texture feature extractor identifies regions in a plurality of stored images that contain homogeneous texture patterns that may vary in intensities, scales, and orientations, and extracts N-component texture feature vectors in these regions. The feature transformer maps the N-component feature vectors into a D-dimensional texture space that is invariant to texture intensity, scale, and orientation. The image ranker ranks the images according to the similarity between the texture patterns that they contain and the query texture measured in the D-dimensional invariant texture space, and the similarity between the N-component feature vectors of the texture patterns. The results of texture matching can be used by a content-based image retrieval system to display a list of images according to their similarity to the query texture.

Claims24

Dependent claims

An apparatus for matching a query texture with a plurality of images, each containing a plurality of textured regions, said apparatus comprising:

feature extraction means for identifying a plurality of regions in the plurality of images, each region containing a texture pattern, extracting an N-component feature vector for each region, and normalizing the extracted N-component feature vectors, where N is an even integer greater than or equal to 2;
normalization means for normalizing the extracted N-component texture feature vectors;
arranging means for arranging each N-component feature vector into a 2-dimensional representation with spatial frequency increasing along one dimension and orientation changing in another dimension;
extraction means for extracting D texture characteristics that are invariant to texture scale and orientation from each 2-dimensional representation and forming a D-dimensional feature vector, where D for said D texture characteristics and said D-dimensional is an integer greater than 1;
computing means for computing the similarity between the query texture and the plurality of images according to the similarity between a D-dimensional feature vector of the query texture and the D-dimensional feature vectors of the plurality of textured regions in the plurality of images;
and
image ranking means for ranking the plurality of images according to their similarity to the query texture.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.