Fusion of Convolutional Neural Network and Statistical Features for Texture classification

Texture is a fundamental characteristic of many types of images, especially those with significant rotation, scale illumination, and viewpoint change. Texture image classification is one of the challenging problems that have various applications such as remote sensing, material recognition, and computer-aided medical diagnosis, etc. Various Computer vision techniques have been used. More recently, Deep learning architectures demonstrated impressive results. This paper aims to investigate combining two feature extraction methods: Handcrafted-based and CNN-based in a two-stream neural network architecture. We believe that Statistical features could enhance the performance of the CNN architecture, especially in the case of small datasets. To test our approach we used two challenging datasets, the Describable Textures Dataset (DTD) and Flicker Material Database (FMD). Results showed that our two-stream neural network which has an image as a first stream and a statistical feature vector as a second stream achieve better results than a Convolutional neural network achieved with just the RGB image as input. The Xception network [9] combined with SIFT-FV demonstrated an accuracy superiority for both datasets.