Evaluation of LBP and Deep Texture Descriptors with a New Robustness Benchmark

In recent years, a wide variety of different texture descriptors has been proposed, includingmany LBP variants. New types of descriptors based on multistage convolutional networks and deep learning have also emerged. In different papers the performance comparison of the proposed methods to earlier approaches is mainly done with some well-known texture datasets, with differing classifiers and testing protocols, and often not using the best sets of parameter values and multiple scales for the comparative methods. Very important aspects such as computational complexity and effects of poor image quality are often neglected. In this paper, we propose a new extensive benchmark (RoTeB) for measuring the robustness of texture operators against different classification challenges, including changes in rotation, scale, illumination, viewpoint, number of classes, different types of image degradation, and computational complexity. Fourteen datasets from the eight most commonly used texture sources are used in the benchmark. An extensive evaluation of the recent most promising LBP variants and some non-LBP descriptors based on deep convolutional networks is carried out. The best overall performance is obtained for the Median Robust Extended Local Binary Pattern (MRELBP) feature. For textures with very large appearance variations, Fisher vector pooling of deep Convolutional Neural Networks is clearly the best, but at the cost of very high computational complexity.The sensitivity to imagedegradations and computational complexity are among the key problems for most of the methods considered.