Texture analysis using fractal descriptors estimated by the mutual interference of color channels

• Fractal descriptors are used to describe color textures.
• Spatial structure and color distribution are analyzed without separating the image into channels.
• The volumes of the dilated structure express the level of details at each scale based on the intensity/color distribution.
• The descriptors combine the efficiency of fractals in describing complex structures with the richness of color analysis.
• The method outperformed other approaches whose effectiveness is widely attested in studies on texture analysis methods.

This work presents a method for color texture analysis based on fractal geometry. The method is based on its predecessor [4] and consists of mapping each color channel onto a surface and dilating such surface by spheres with a variable radius. The descriptors are obtained from the relation between the volumes of the dilated surfaces and the dilation radii. The dilation process creates a mutual interference among the color channels. The proposed descriptors measure the degree of such interference as well as the complexity of pixel intensity arrangements. This combination provides a robust and precise texture description. The efficiency of the method is assessed in a classification task of well-known texture data sets and the results demonstrate that it outperforms the best approaches described in the literature.