Evaluation and comparison of texture descriptors proposed in MPEG-7

Texture description contributes as one of the most important low-level features in content-based image retrieval. In MPEG-7, homogeneous texture descriptor (HTD), texture browsing descriptor (TBD), and edge histogram descriptor (EHD) have been proposed as texture descriptors. However, no comprehensive evaluation and comparison of these three descriptors have been made. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive evaluation and comparison benchmark for feature descriptors, especially for visual descriptors in MPEG-7. In the proposed benchmark, three texture descriptors in MPEG-7 are evaluated and compared. First, the descriptors are analyzed according to the standard criteria. Second, experiments are implemented on the Brodatz texture image database. Analysis of the experimental results shows that each descriptor has some specific characteristics and performs better than the other two in certain applications. The applicability is also summarized for each descriptor. The survey as well as performance evaluation and comparison in this paper provide several guidelines for using these descriptors in image retrieval and other applications. 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.