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.