A TV flow based local scale measure for texture discrimination

Abstract: We introduce a technique for measuring local scale, based on a special property of the so-called total variational (TV) flow. For TV flow, pixels change their value with a speed that is inversely proportional to the size of the region they belong to. Exploiting this property directly leads to a region based measure for scale that is well-suited for texture discrimination. Together with the image intensity and texture features computed from the second moment matrix, which measures the orientation of a texture, a sparse feature space of dimension 5 is obtained that covers the most important descriptors of a texture: magnitude, orientation, and scale. A demonstration of the performance of these features is given in the scope of texture segmentation.