Texture Features for Content-Based Retrieval

Texture is an intuitive concept. Every child knows that leopards have spots but tigers have stripes, that curly hair looks different from straight hair, etc. In all these examples there are variations of intensity and color which form certain repeated patterns called visual texture. The patterns can be the result of physical surface properties such as roughness or oriented strands which often have a tactile quality, or they could be the result of reflectance differences such as the color on a surface. Even though the concept of texture is intuitive (we recognize texture when we see it), a precise definition of texture has proven difficult to formulate. This difficulty is demonstrated by the number of different texture definitions attempted in the literature [7, 12, 38, 65, 70].