Description of Textures by a Structural Analysis

Abstract

We introduce a method of a structural analysis for description of textures in natural scenes. The proposed texture analysis system automatically extracts the elements in a texture image , measures their picture properties, classifies them into some discriminable classes (one "gr o und" and some "figures"), and produces the description of elements in each class and also of their placement rules. This description can be used for learning and recognition of texture images. We also present a new idea for evaluating texture analyzers. In order to directly see what essential features or structurs of the given textures each analyzer extracts, we propose an analysis-by-synthesis method. That is, the synthesis program in our system reconstructs the texture image on the basis of its description. Comparing the reconstructed image with the original one, we can evaluate what information is preserved and what is lost in the description and c an improve our algorithms.