A Novel Integration of Intensity Order and Texture for Effective Feature Description

Abstract

SUMMARYThis paper introduces a novel approach of feature description by integrating the intensity order and textures in different support regions into a compact vector. We first propose the Intensity Order Local Binary Pattern (IO-LBP) operator, which simultaneously encodes the gradient and texture information in the local neighborhood of a pixel. We divide each region of interest into segments according to the order of pixel intensities, build one histogram of IO-LBP patterns for each segment, and then concatenate all histograms to obtain a feature descriptor. Furthermore, multi support regions are adopted to enhance the distinctiveness. The proposed descriptor effectively describes a region at both local and global levels, and thus high performance is expected. Experimental results on the Oxford benchmark and images of cast shadows show that our approach is invariant to common photometric and geometric transformations, such as illumination change and image rotation, and robust to complex lighting effects caused by shadows. It achieves a comparable accuracy to that of state-of-art methods while performs considerably faster.