Multi-scale gray level co-occurrence matrices for texture description

Texture information plays an important role in image analysis. Although several descriptors have been proposed to extract and analyze texture, the development of automatic systems for image interpretation and object recognition is a difficult task due to the complex aspects of texture. Scale is an important information in texture analysis, since a same texture can be perceived as different texture patterns at distinct scales. Gray level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) have been proved to be an effective texture descriptor. This paper presents a novel strategy for extending the GLCM to multiple scales through two different approaches, a Gaussian scale-space representation, which is constructed by smoothing the image with larger and larger low-pass filters producing a set of smoothed versions of the original image, and an image pyramid, which is defined by sampling the image both in space and scale. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated by applying the multi-scale descriptor on five benchmark texture data sets and the results are compared to other well-known texture operators, including the original GLCM, that even though faster than the proposed method, is significantly outperformed in accuracy.