Multi-scale LBP fusion with the contours from deep CellNNs for texture classification

In texture classification, local binary pattern (LBP) is currently one of the most widely-concerned feature encoding models. Most existing LBP-based texture classification methods are usually limited to single-kind texture features. In fact, an across-domain fusion of LBP features with other features, such as image contours, could be another potential path to promote texture classification. To enhance the feature modelling ability of LBP-based methods, this paper firstly designs a Cellular Neural Network (CellNN) with recurrent convolutions, initially trained by a simplified simulated-annealing algorithm, to extract informative image contours. For better reliability, a new three-channel contour extractor of deep CellNNs (i.e., dCellNNs) is proposed. This extractor contains the initially-trained CellNNs of more than three layers, and it is further optimized by fine-tuning parameters. Moreover, a new weighted-base algorithm is designed to fulfil the fusion of the multi-scale texture features by LBPs and the contour features by dCellNNs to enhance feature representation. Finally, these enhanced features are concatenated together to generate the final multi-scale features of given texture image. On texture datasets KTH, Brodatz, OTC12 and UIUC, experiment results verify that the across-domain fusion of multi-scale LBPs and dCellNNs is efficient in capturing & enhancing texture features. With moderate feature dimensionality and computational costs, it could improve texture classification, acquiring an obvious accuracy increase on previous state-of-the-art ones, e.g., a rise of 2.58% on KTH-TIPS2b, a rise of 3.11% on Brodatz, a rise of 0.71% on OTC12 and a rise of 0.42% on UIUC.