Evaluating color texture descriptors under large variations of controlled lighting conditions

The recognition of color texture under varying lighting conditions remains an open issue. Several features have been proposed for this purpose, ranging from traditional statistical descriptors to features extracted with neural networks. Still, it is not completely clear under what circumstances a feature performs better than others. In this paper, we report an extensive comparison of old and new texture features, with and without a color normalization step, with a particular focus on how these features are affected by small and large variations in the lighting conditions. The evaluation is performed on a new texture database, which includes 68 samples of raw food acquired under 46 conditions that present single and combined variations of light color, direction, and intensity. The database allows us to systematically investigate the robustness of texture descriptors across large variations of imaging conditions.