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Feature detection is used in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation, object recognition, and image retrieval. For these applications, robustness with respect to shadows, shading, and specularities is desired. Features based on derivatives of photometric invariants, which we will call full in variants, provide the desired robustness. However, because computation of photometric invariants involves nonlinear transformations, these features are unstable and, therefore, impractical for many applications. We propose a new class of derivatives which we refer to as quasi-invariants. These quasi-invariants are derivatives which share with full photometric invariants the property that they are insensitive for certain photometric edges, such as shadows or specular edges, but without the inherent instabilities of full photometric invariants. Experiments show that the quasi-invariant derivatives are less sensitive to noise and introduce less edge displacement than full invariant derivatives. Moreover, quasi-invariants significantly outperform the full invariant derivatives in terms of discriminative power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describing textures is a challenging problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. The classification problem involves assigning a category label to the texture class it belongs to. Several factors such as variations in scale, illumination and viewpoint make the problem of texture description extremely challenging. A variety of histogram based texture representations exists in literature. However, combining multiple texture descriptors and assessing their complementarity is still an open research problem. In this paper, we first show that combining multiple local texture descriptors significantly improves the recognition performance compared to using a single best method alone. This gain in performance is achieved at the cost of high-dimensional final image representation. To counter this problem, we propose to use an information-theoretic compression technique to obtain a compact texture description without any significant loss in accuracy. In addition, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of pure color descriptors, popular in object recognition, for the problem of texture classification. Experiments are performed on four challenging texture datasets namely, KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b, FMD and Texture-10. The experiments clearly demonstrate that our proposed compact multi-texture approach outperforms the single best texture method alone. In all cases, discriminative color names outperforms other color features for texture classification. Finally, we show that combining discriminative color names with compact texture representation outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.8%, 4.3% and 5.0% on KTH-TIPS-2a, KTH-TIPS-2b and Texture-10 datasets respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]