A statistical model for magnitudes and angles of wavelet frame coefficients and its application to texture retrieval

• We propose a new texture descriptor, based on wavelet frames.
• Magnitudes and angles of details are statistically modeled.
• A KLD-based distance gives relative importance to each model and resolution level.
• The distance is extended in a natural way to provide rotation invariance.
• Compared with other results, we obtain superior retrieval rates for a set of fewer parameters.

This paper presents a texture descriptor based on wavelet frame transforms. At each position in the image, and for each resolution level, we consider both vertical and horizontal wavelet detail coefficients as the components of a bivariate random vector. The magnitudes and angles of these vectors are computed. At each level the empirical histogram of magnitudes is modeled by a Generalized Gamma distribution, and the empirical histogram of angles is modeled by a different version of the von Mises distribution that accounts for histograms with 2 modes. Each texture is characterized by few parameters. A new distance is presented (based on the Kullback–Leibler divergence) that allows giving relative importance to each model and to each resolution level. This distance is later conveniently adapted to provide for rotation invariance, by establishing equivalence classes over distributions of angles. Through a broad set of experiments on three different image databases, we demonstrate that our new descriptor and distance measure can be successfully applied in the context of texture retrieval. We compare our system to several relevant methods in this field in terms of retrieval performance and number of parameters used by each method. We also include some classification tests. In all the tests, we obtain superior retrieval rates for a set of fewer parameters involved.