A Unifying Framework for LBP and Related Methods

In this chapter we describe a unifying framework for local binary patterns and variants which we refer to as histograms of equivalent patterns (HEP). In presenting this concept we discuss some basic issues in texture analysis: the problem of defining what texture is; the problem of classifying the many existing texture descriptors; the concept of bag-of-features and the design choices that one has to deal with when designing a texture descriptor. We show how this relates to local binary patterns and related methods and propose a unifying mathematical formalism to express them within the HEP. Finally, we give a geometrical interpretation of these methods as partitioning operators in a high-dimensional space, showing how this representation can propound possible directions for future research.