Towards Robust Colour Texture Analysis with Limited Training Data

Abstract

Texture analysis plays an important role in different domains of healthcare, agriculture, and industry, where multi-channel sensors are gaining more attention. This contribution presents an interpretable and efficient framework for texture classification and segmentation that exploits colour or channel information and does not require much data to produce accurate results. This makes such a framework well-suited for medical applications and resource-limited hardware. Our approach builds upon a distance-based generalized matrix learning vector quantization (GMLVQ) algorithm. We extend it with parametrized angle-based dissimilarity and introduce a special matrix format for multi-channel images. Classification accuracy evaluation of various model designs was performed on VisTex and ALOT data, and the segmentation application was demonstrated on an agricultural data set. Our extension of parametrized angle dissimilarity measure leads to better model generalization and robustness against varying lighting conditions than its Euclidean counterpart. The proposed matrix format for multichannel images enhances classification accuracy while reducing the number of parameters. Regarding segmentation, our method shows promising results, provided with a small class-imbalanced training data set. Proposed methodology achieves higher accuracy than prior work benchmarks and a small-scale CNN while maintaining a significantly lower parameter count. Notably, it is interpretable and accurate in scenarios where limited and unbalanced training data are available.