Texture Transformations

Introduction
Humans are quite adapt at dealing with textures - in our thought process we intuitively take
into the nature of variability and patterns, edges etc when analyzing an image. Most image
processing algorithms only work with spectral or tonal information. However, several methods to
measure texture have been developed to measure texture automatically.
If a set of contiguous pixels have identical or similar DN values they are said to comprise a
discretetonal feature. Conversely if these pixels have a wide range of DN values, then a property of this
area is texture(Jensen, 1997). There are numerous methods that have been developed to measure
texture. The majority of these operate in the spatial domain. The approaches include first- and
second-order statistics and fractal analysis. Attempts to undertake texture analysis in the frequency
domain (e.g. using Fourier analysis) have met with limited success.
Simple Texture Measurements
One of the simplest measurements of texture would simply to determine the difference
between the maximum and minimum gray values occurring in a moving window. A slight
modification to this simple max - min operator has been proposed. It is a five element moving
window shaped like this:
A
B C D
E
For this moving window a texture measurement is also calculated simply as the difference
between the brightest and darkest pixels in the window.
First Order Statistics
One approach to attempting to quantify the texture of small areas uses standard first-order
statistical measures of local areas using. 3x3, 5x5 , 7x7 or other sizes of moving windows. Three of
these metrics are Average, Standard Deviation, and Entropy (from Jensen, 1997) and they are
defined as follows:
In the above equations, f
i
is the frequency of gray level i occuring in a moving window and
quant
k
is the possible range of gray values in a the band (k) of interest and W is the total number of
pixels in the moving window
=
=
k
quant
i
i
f i
W
AVE
0
1
( )
i
quant
i
f AVE i
W
STD
k
=
=
2
0
1
W
f
W
f
ENT
i
quant
i
i
k
ln
0
=
Second-Order Statistics
Harlick (1979,1986) has proposed a higher order of texture metrics. The fundamental
concept behind these metrics is the idea of a spatially dependent gray level co-occurrence matrix
(GLCM). In this approach a set of matrices are created that show the probability that a pair of
brightness values (i,j) will occur at a certain separation from each other (x,y). The assumption is
that the textural dependence will be at angles of 0, 45, 90 or 135 (with 0 being to the right and
90 above) from the original pixel that means four GLCM matrices would have to be created.
For example (taken from Jensen, 1997), here is a small portion of image
0 1 1 2 3
0 0 2 3 3
0 1 2 2 3
1 2 3 2 2
2 2 3 3 2
The GLCM for an angle of 0and a separation of one pixel in x and y is as follows:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 1 0
1 0 1 3 0
2 0 0 3 5
3 0 0 2 2
Once a set of 4 GLCM have been created a number of useful metrics can be derived. Three
of the most widely used (and actually implemented in image processing packages) are angular second
moment (ASM), contrast (CON) and correlation (COR):
( )
2
0 0
,
= =
=
k k
quant
j
c
quant
i
j i h ASM
( ) ( ) j i h j i CON
c
quant
o i
quant
o i
k k
,
2
=
= =
( )( ) ( )
= =

=
k k
quant
j
c
quant
i
j i h j i
COR
0
2
2
0
,

where
These metrics are calculated for each pixel for each using each of the four GCLMs and then
a final texture value is usually calculated as an average of all four. It is obvious that these
measurements can be computationally expensive especially as the quantization level becomes large.
For many applications it may be beneficial to quantize the image into a smaller number of gray levels
prior to creating the GLCMs.
( )
( ) ( ) j i h i
j i h i
c
quant
i
quant
i
quant
i
c
quant
i
k k
k k
,
,
2
0 0
2
0 0
=
=
= =
= =