Texture recognition based on diffusion in networks

•A texture recognition method is proposed.•The image is modeled into networks.•The texture is characterized by the diffusion over the networks.•It is demonstrated that directed networks are better to texture recognition.•The proposed method outperform the state-of-the-art.

Much work has been done in the field of texture analysis and classification. While promising classification methods have been proposed, most of them rely on classical image analysis approaches. This paper presents a texture classification method based on diffusion in directed networks. First, an image is modeled as a directed network by mapping each pixel as a node and connecting two nodes up to a maximum distance r. To reveal texture properties, links between two nodes are removed based on the pixel intensity difference. Once such a network is obtained, the activity of each node is estimated by random walks and combined into a histogram to describe the image. The main contribution of this paper is the use of directed networks, which tends to provide better performance than in undirected cases. Also, we have shown that the activity induced on these networks can be effectively used as texture descriptor. Experimental results show that the proposed method is favorably compared to traditional texture methods on widely used texture datasets. The proposed method is also found to be promising for plant species classification using samples of leaf texture.