Design-based texture feature fusion using Gabor filters and co-occurrence probabilities

A design-based method to fuse Gabor filter and grey level co-occurrence probability (GLCP) features for improved texture recognition is presented. The fused feature set utilizes both the Gabor filter's capability of accurately capturing lower and mid-frequency texture information and the GLCP's capability in texture information relevant to higher frequency components. Evaluation methods include comparing feature space separability and comparing image segmentation classification rates. The fused feature sets are demonstrated to produce higher feature space separations, as well as higher segmentation accuracies relative to the individual feature sets. Fused feature sets also outperform individual feature sets for noisy images, across different noise magnitudes. The curse of dimensionality is demonstrated not to affect segmentation using the proposed the 48-dimensional fused feature set. Gabor magnitude responses produce higher segmentation accuracies than linearly normalized Gabor magnitude responses. Feature reduction using principal component analysis is acceptable for maintaining the segmentation performance, but feature reduction using the feature contrast method dramatically reduced the segmentation accuracy. Overall, the designed fused feature set is advocated as a means for improving texture segmentation performance.