Fast and Accurate Texture Recognition with Multilayer Convolution and Multifractal Analysis

A fast and accurate texture recognition system is presented. The new approach consists in extracting locally and globally invariant representations. The locally invariant representation is built on a multi-resolution convolutional network with a local pooling operator to improve robustness to local orientation and scale changes. This representation is mapped into a globally invariant descriptor using multifractal analysis. We propose a new multifractal descriptor that captures rich texture information and is mathematically invariant to various complex transformations. In addition, two more techniques are presented to further improve the robustness of our system. The first technique consists in combining the generative PCA classifier with multiclass SVMs. The second technique consists of two simple strategies to boost classification results by synthetically augmenting the training set. Experiments show that the proposed solution outperforms existing methods on three challenging public benchmark datasets, while being computationally efficient.