Wavelet-Energy-Weighted Local Binary Pattern Analysis for Tire Tread Pattern Classification

Tire tread pattern image classification plays an important role in crime scene and traffic accident investigation. Due to the lack of standard test dataset, there is little work done in this area. For efficient texture feature description, inherent characteristic of tire patterns need to be considered. Leveraging on the directionality characteristics of tread patterns, a novel texture feature extraction algorithm is proposed based on adaptive weighted feature fusion with the weights defined by sub-band energy ratio. The proposed approach consists of: (1) discrete wavelet decomposition of tire tread image to obtain low frequency, horizontal, vertical and diagonal sub-bands; (2) extraction of rotation-invariant uniform local binary pattern features from the sub-band images; (3) concatenating the tread pattern directional features, weighted by their corresponding sub-band energies. Applying SVM for tire tread pattern classification, experimental results on real-world tire tread patterns show that the proposed texture feature extraction algorithm is outperforms other prior methods.