Extended fractal analysis for texture classification and segmentation

The Hurst parameter for two-dimensional (2-D) fractional Brownian motion (fBm) provides a single number that completely characterizes isotropic textured surfaces whose roughness is scale-invariant. Extended self-similar (ESS) processes were previously introduced in order to provide a generalization of fBm. These new processes are described by a number of multiscale Hurst parameters. In contrast to the single Hurst parameter, the extended parameters are able to characterize a greater variety of natural textures where the roughness of these textures is not necessarily scale-invariant. In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of multiscale Hurst parameters as features for texture classification and segmentation. For texture classification, the performance of the generalized Hurst features is compared to traditional Hurst and Gabor features. Our experiments show that classification accuracy for the generalized Hurst and Gabor features are comparable even though the generalized Hurst features lower the dimensionality by a factor of five. Next, the segmentation accuracy using generalized and standard Hurst features is evaluated on images of texture mosaics. For these experiments, the performance is evaluated with and without supplemental contrast and average grayscale features. Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of the Hurst features to segment real synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery.