Invariant texture matching method for image retrieval

Abstract

A method and apparatus matches texture patterns in a way that is invariant to the intensities, scales, and orientations of the texture patterns. The texture matching apparatus includes a texture feature extractor, a feature transformer, and an image ranker. The texture feature extractor identifies regions in a plurality of stored images that contain homogeneous texture patterns that may vary in intensities, scales, and orientations, and extracts N-component texture feature vectors in these regions. The feature transformer maps the N-component feature vectors into a D-dimensional texture space that is invariant to texture intensity, scale, and orientation. The image ranker ranks the images according to the similarity between the texture patterns that they contain and the query texture measured in the D-dimensional invariant texture space, and the similarity between the N-component feature vectors of the texture patterns. The results of texture matching can be used by a content-based image retrieval system to display a list of images according to their similarity to the query texture.