Deep convolutional neural networks for regular texture recognition

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2022 Feb 9:8:e869. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.869. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Regular textures are frequently found in man-made environments and some biological and physical images. There are a wide range of applications for recognizing and locating regular textures. In this work, we used deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as a general method for modelling and classifying regular and irregular textures. We created a new regular texture database and investigated two sets of deep CNNs-based methods for regular and irregular texture classification. First, the classic CNN models (e.g. inception, residual network, etc.) were used in a standard way. These two-class CNN classifiers were trained by fine-tuning networks using our new regular texture database. Next, we transformed the trained filter features of the last convolutional layer into a vector representation using Fisher Vector pooling (FV). Such representations can be efficiently used for a wide range of machine learning tasks such as classification or clustering, thus more transferable from one domain to another. Our experiments show that the standard CNNs attained sufficient accuracy for regular texture recognition tasks. The Fisher representations combined with support vector machine (SVM) also showed high performance for regular and irregular texture classification. We also find CNNs performs sub-optimally for long-range patterns, despite the fact that their fully-connected layers pool local features into a global image representation.

Keywords: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs); Long-range features; Regular texture; Repetitive patterns; Texture recognition.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61806023 and 61572083), the Henan Provincial Department of Transportation Science and Technology Project (No. 2021G8). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.