Optimized Local Ternary Patterns: A New Texture Model with Set of Optimal Patterns for Texture Analysis

Texture analysis is one of the important as well as useful tasks in image processing applications. Many texture models have been developed over the past few years and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) is one of the simple and efficient approach among them. A number of extensions to the LBP method have been also presented but the problem remains challenging in feature vector generation and comparison. As textures are oriented and scaled differently, a texture model should effectively handle grey-scale variation, rotation variation, illumination variation and noise. The length of the feature vector in a texture model also plays an important role in deciding the time complexity of the texture analysis. This study proposes a new texture model, called Optimized Local Ternary Patterns (OLTP) in the spatial methods of texture analysis. The proposed texture model is based on Local Ternary Patterns (LTP), which in turn is based on LBP. A new concept called "Level of Optimality" to select the optimal set of patterns is discussed in this study. This proposed texture model uses only optimal patterns to extract the textural information from the digital images and thereby reducing the length of the feature vector. This proposed model is robust to image rotation, grey-scale transformation, histogram equalization and noise. The results are compared with other widely used texture models by applying classification tests to variety of texture images from the standard Brodatz texture database. Experimental results prove that the proposed texture model is robust to grey-scale variation, image rotation, histogram equalization and noise. Experimental results also show that the proposed texture model improves the classification accuracy and the speed of the classification process. In all tested tasks, the proposed method outperforms the earlier methods.