Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Informatics & Applications, Takamatsu, Japan, 2015

Robust Local Graph Structure for Texture Classification

Housam Khalifa Bashier1, Lau Siong Hoe2 and Pang Ying Han3
'

Faculty of Information Science & Technology, Multimedia University,

Jalan Ayer Keroh Lama,75450,Melaka Malaysia

me.the.fren@gmail.com1 , lau.siong.hoe@mmu.edu.my2 , yhpang@mmu.edu.com3

Abstract Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is one of the

most popular operators in computer vision and digital
image processing due to its simplicity and unique
property of capturing local features. Yet, the local
binary pattern operator has some drawbacks such as
sensitivity to noise and illumination changes and this
because of the thresholding process. Recently, Local
Graph Structure (LGS) is proposed as an alternative
solution to (LBP) to overcome the thresholding
process by encoding the pattern based on the
relationship of the pixels that form the local graph. In
addition, (LGS) is investigated in many areas such as
face recognition, spoofing and plant identification.
Hence, in this paper we extend the idea of (LGS) and
propose a new operator called Robust Local Graph
Structure (RLGS) which utilizes the standard
deviation of the local graph to capture more spatial
information. Finally, the reported experiments results
on (UIUC) texture database showed a significant
increase in the performance with compare to other
texture operators.

KeywordsLocal Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Graph

Structure (LGS), Symmetric Local Graph Structure
(SLGS), Texture Classification, Local Features.

descriptors to obtain the texture features [6] and

many others which can be found in [7-11].
The above mentioned algorithms have proven to be
rotation invariants, yet they are not robust when it
comes to illumination changes. Therefore, in [12] the
Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is proposed to tackle the
rotation invariant problem. The (LBP) operator is
simple, the pattern is computed based on
thresholding the centre pixel with its neighbours and
then the texture feature is represented based on using
a histogram. The (LBP), is computationally
unexpansive and its invariant to monotonic gray
scale transformations.
On the other hand, a new operator called Local
Graph Structure (LGS) is proposed for face
recognition [13]. The (LGS), simply changed the
structure of (LBP) to improve the thresholding
process. In (LGS) operator authors encode the binary
pattern in a local graph structure. The binary pattern
is based on moving in the dominant graph anticlockwise and clockwise and then the binary value is
obtained using the binary weight.

To this end, motivated by statistical analysis we

propose a new descriptor based on the original
I. INTRODUCTION
(LGS), i.e., Robust Local Graph Structure (RLGS).
The area of texture classification is one of the The idea behind this operator, is to compute the
important topics in biometrics and computer vision (LGS) feature with help of finding the standard
and has been widely used in many domains, for deviation of the local graph in order to capture wider
instance face identification [1], image processing of spatial information from edges/neighbours and also
biomedical data [2] and image retrieval algorithms to get the appearance and the spatial relation of a
[3]. However, in real world scenarios the texture given pixel intensity.
images captured using camera sensor may have
different orientation variation and this is causes the This paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
algorithms to fail. Therefore, in order to overcome reviews (LBP) and (LGS) extension. The proposed
this issue, the use of rotation invariant texture algorithm, which is used to tackle the texture
analysis is required for practical and theoretical classification is introduced in Section III. In section
IV, Experiments results and discussion are carried
viewpoint.
In order to overcome the problem of rotations out. Finally, in Section V, conclusions are drawn.
invariants, researchers proposed many solutions to
capture features from texture images [4]. For
II. RELATED WORK
example, authors in [5] proposed occurrences
This section mainly discusses three texture
matrices with the use of polarograms to capture
rotation features. Some they applied Fourier operators Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Graph

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Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Informatics & Applications, Takamatsu, Japan, 2015

Structure (LGS) and Symmetric Local Graph

Structure (SLGS).
a. Local Binary Pattern (LBP)
The (LBP) is popular and widely applied in
computer vision and images, see the below Figure.
1. The operator can be described by the following
formula:
p 1

LBP( xc , yc ) s( g p g c )2 p.
p 0

Where p 8. p 0,1, 2,...7.

(1)

proposed whats known as a lookup table in which

they store all the binary patterns who have at most
two transition (0, 1) and then use it to map the new
pixel intensity. In the same paper [12] authors have
proposed whats known as rotation invariant for
uniform pattern. In addition, one of the demerits is
that a small change in the centre pixel may greatly
affects the final binary pattern for example if the
centre pixel was 30 before (LBP) and after (LBP) it
might become 100. To tackle this issue, authors in
[18] extended the idea of (LBP) to overcome the
noise problem. The contribution was to have 3 values
for the pattern and the algorithm is called Local
Ternary Pattern (LTP). After this, the results are
robust against noise yet not robust against monotonic
gray-scale transformations.
b. Local Graph Structure (LGS)

The idea of (LGS) is illustrated in Figure.3.

(LGS), is based on encoding the binary pattern in the
However, (LBP) has some drawbacks for instance, form of the dominant graph. This is means that,
the (LBP) operator sometimes encodes totally (LGS) doesnt relies on the centre pixel I (x, y) and
different structure with the same binary pattern as its neighbours but in-fact it relies on the relationship
shown in Figure.2.
of the pixels that form the local graph. Also, local
graph structure (LGS) operator is found to be
computationally unexpansive with compare to local
binary pattern (LBP) [13].
Figure. 1: The Local Binary Pattern (LBP) operator

Figure. 3: The Local Graph Structure (LGS) operator

The operator first starts by choosing the target

pixel I(x,y). As in the example of Figure. 3 the target
pixel is 6 (in gray color). Then (LGS), encodes the
Figure. 2: The Local Binary Pattern (LBP) operator
first pattern by moving anti-clockwise and this
means if we are moving from a large vertex to
To overcome the known problem, many works have small/equal vertex then we assign 1on the edge
been proposed in literature as one popular one is connecting the two vertices else we assign 0. This
known as uniform pattern in which authors [12] process continues on the right region of the local
stated that there are few patterns occupy the majority graph but this time moving clock-wise and finally we
of (LBP) patterns at about 90%. To this end, they compute the decimal value from the generated string.

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Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Informatics & Applications, Takamatsu, Japan, 2015

Due to the simplicity and computationally speed, the

operator is applied to many domains [14-17].
The local graph structure algorithm utilizes a unique
property in which (LGS) takes into the consideration
the relation of the pixels that form the local graph.
Therefore, The relationship between the pixels that
from the local graph gives strong pattern and thus
can easily discriminate between texture images. In
addition, it gives more information regarding the
pattern rather than depending on one pixel as in
Local Binary Pattern (LBP).
c. Symmetric Local Graph Structure
(SLGS)
Recently in [19], authors proposed an extension to
the original (LGS). The idea was to change the
structure of (LGS) to make it more balance and
symmetric in order to address the problem of face
recognition [19]. The regions of the graph are
equally divided based on the symmetric (SLGS), see
Figure.4. The reported results showed an
encouraging performance with compare to the
original operator. However, the method has not been
tested on texture classification yet. Therefore, in this
paper, we evaluate the robustness of (SLGS) in
texture analysis.

better gradient information with compare to (LGS).

Hence, in order to do this, the local standard
deviation is computed before encoding the local
graph pattern. Firstly, we compute the standard
deviation and then add it to the next pixel intensity
P(x,y) when moving in the local graph. This greatly
helps in encoding the appearance and the spatial
relation of the texture image. Moreover, this is
improves the discriminative capability. Finally, the
standard deviation of the local graph is defined as:

=1( )

(2)

Where X is a vector which contains the values of the

local graph, is the mean and n is the number of
samples.
To get the basic concept, lets see the below
example, the local in Figure.5 is 53.84. Then the
target pixel is coloured in gray. The first pixel in the
local graph is 80 hence we add the standard deviation
to 80 which becomes 133.84. In this case, we are
moving from a large vertex to small vertex and thus
we assign 1 on the edge connecting the two vertices.
Finally, this process continues till we get 8 binary
values as shown in Figure.5 and these binary values
shall be used to compute the decimal value.

Figure. 4: The Symmetric Local Graph Structure (SLGS)

operator [19]

Finally, the robust graph concept has been also

used in different fields which can be found in [2022].
Figure. 5: Proposed Robust Local Graph Structure (RLGS)
operator.

ROBUST LOCAL GRAPH STRUCTURE

The standard deviation here captures discriminative
(RLGS)
information in the local graph structure. Finally, the
This sections discusses the proposed texture algorithm can be summarized as follow:
operator. The idea behind (RLGS) is to utilize the
statistical information of the local graph to encode
more spatial information. Our aim, is to capture
III.

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Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Informatics & Applications, Takamatsu, Japan, 2015

RLGS Algorithm:
1. Determine target pixel I(x,y) in the Local
Graph.
2. Construct (LGS) graph G.
3. Compute local standard deviation.
4. Assign 1 If the current pixel >= next
pixel+
5. Move to the next pixel till we finish
processing G.
6. Go to step 3.
7. If we process all the image then compute the
feature histogram h.
The (RLGS), generates a descriptor n; then its
histogram computed h. The resulting histogram
feature encodes the texture pattern.
On the other hand, the algorithm can be further
exploited by defining the distance measure.
Therefore, in this research work we experiment
different distance measures to classify the texture
pattern:
-

Histogram intersection ():

(, ) = =0 min( , )

(3)

- Chi-square statistics ( 2 ):
2 (, ) =

( )2

(4)

- Correlation coefficient ( ):
(, ) =

( )( )
[( )2 ])([( )2 ])

(5)

- Cosine similarity ():

=1 ( )

(, ) =

=1

( 2 )

=1

(6)
( 2 )

applications. Our experiments are carried out on one

representative texture database known as (UIUC)
[18]. Example pictures are shown in Figure.6. This
database has 25 classes with images captured under
uncontrolled illumination, 3D shape, albedo
variation and a mixture of both. In order to assess the
robustness of (RLGS) algorithm, M training samples
are randomly chosen from the database while the rest
R images are chosen for testing.

Figure. 6: 9 texture images from (UIUC) database

Experimental results on (UIUC) database are

illustrated in Figure.7 and Table 1. The results are
compared with other texture classification operators
such as: LBP [21], rotation invariant (LBP) [21],
LPQ [14], LGS [7] and SLGS [9]. The process,
computes the features for each operator
independently and the computed features are then
fed into a classifier to find the nearest neighbour.
From Table.1, one can observe that (RLGS) is robust
in comparison to other algorithms. Yielding a high
classification rate of 81.81% using chai-square
distance measure. In addition, the below Table.1
summarizes the highest classification rate achieved
by each operator.

Where (A, B) are two histograms with n bin each and

the histogram is used as a feature representation for
the classification task. The above equations measure
the distance between two histograms vectors
(training vs. testing) of the texture image.
IV. EXPERIMENTS AND ANALYSIS
In this section, the (RLGS) is adopted for texture
classification, which plays an important role in many

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Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Informatics & Applications, Takamatsu, Japan, 2015
TABLE 1
BEST CLASSIFICATION RATE OBTAINED BY EACH METHOD

Algorithm

Classification Rate, Error Rate and

Distance Measure
Classification
Rate

Error
Rate

Distance
Measure

LBP

75.45

24.55

Chi-square

Rotation
invariant
LBP
LPQ

68.18

31.82

Correlation
Coefficient

76.36

23.64

Chai-Square

LGS

75.45

24.55

Chai-Square

SLGS

73.63

26.37

Histogram
Intersection

RLGS

81.81

18.19

Chai-Square
/Histogram
Intersection

V. CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, this paper extended the idea of the
(LGS) by considering the standard deviation of the
local graph. The aim was to capture more spatial
information. Moreover, chai-square and histogram
intersection distance measures achieved a
significance performance with compare to
correlation coefficient and cosine distance measures.
The obtained results showed a good performance
with compare to other methods such as (LBP, LPQ,
LGS and SLGS). In addition, future work is required
in order to validate the operator against noisy images
and also to look further in applying the method to
other image processing computer vision
applications.
REFERENCES
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CLASSIFICATION RATE

Figure.7 shows the classification rate of the proposed

method against other operators using different
distance measures, from which we could make the
following findings. First, the chai-square performs
better for the majority of the method. Second,
(RLGS) achieves an acceptable classification rate
using different distance measures. In addition, one
interesting point to note is, the histogram intersection
and chai-square distance achieve good classification
rate with compare to the other distance measures.
LBP

LGS

LPQ

LBP-Uinform

SLGS

RLGS

100
50
0
CHI

COSINE

HIST

CORR

DISTANCE MEASURES

Figure. 7: Performance using different distance measures

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