Feature Extraction

ANISHA M. LAL
 Feature Extraction
• After an image has been segmented into regions of interest, image
representation and image description in a form suitable for further
processing of the image is very important.
• Representing a region can be done in two ways. (1) in terms of its
external characteristics and (2) in terms of its internal characteristics.
• An external representation is chosen when the primary focus is on
shape analysis. An internal representation is preferred when the
primary focus is on regional properties like color and texture.
• The textural description is done by extracting features from the
image.
• An image feature is a distinguishing primitive characteristic or
attribute of an image.
 Image Texture
• Color is an important cue not only in human vision but also in digital image
processing where its impact is still rising. Color is measured globally
according to the histogram ignoring local neighboring pixels.
• Image texture measurements can be used to segment an image and classify
its segments. Texture is characterized by the relationship of the intensities of
neighboring pixels ignoring their color.
• Texture plays an important role in many machine vision tasks such as
surface inspection, scene classification, surface orientation and shape
determination. Texture is characterized by the spatial distribution of gray
levels in a neighborhood.
 Texture
• Texture is a feature used to partition images into regions of interest
and to classify those regions.
• Texture provides information in the spatial arrangement of colors or
intensities in an image.
• Texture is characterized by the spatial distribution of intensity levels
in a neighbourhood.
• Texture is a repeating pattern of local variations in image intensity:
– Texture cannot be defined for a point.
• For example, an image has a 50% black and 50% white distribution of pixels.

• Three different images with the same intensity distribution, but with different textures.
• Texture consists of texture primitives or texture elements, sometimes called
texels.
• – Texture can be described as fine, coarse, grained, smooth, etc.
• – Such features are found in the tone and structure of a texture.
• – Tone is based on pixel intensity properties in the texel, whilst structure
represents the spatial relationship between texels.
• If texels are small and tonal differences between texels are large a fine
texture results.
• – If texels are large and consist of several pixels, a coarse texture results.
 Texture Analysis
• There are two primary issues in texture analysis:
• texture classification
• texture segmentation
• Texture segmentation is concerned with automatically determining the
boundaries between various texture regions in an image.
• Texture classification is concerned with identifying a given textured
region from a given set of texture classes.
– Each of these regions has unique texture characteristics.
– Statistical methods are extensively used.
e.g. GLCM, contrast, entropy, homogeneity
 Types of texture features
 Texture analysis has played an important role in many areas including
medical imaging, remote sensing and industrial inspection and image
retrieval. The texture analysis is diverse and differs from each other by the
method used for extracting textural features.
 Four categories of extracting textural features are:
 1) Statistical methods
 2) Structural methods
 3) Model based methods
 4) Transform-based methods.
 Statistical texture analysis
• Statistical: texture is a quantitative measure of the arrangement of
intensities in a region. This set of measurements is called a feature vector.
• Statistical texture analysis techniques describe texture of regions in an
image through higher order moments of their grayscale histograms. The
most commonly used method for texture analysis is based on extracting
various textural features from a gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM).
• The GLCM approach is based on the use of second-order statistics of the
grayscale image histograms.
• Structural texture analysis techniques describe a texture as the composition of well-
defined texture elements such as regularly spaced parallel lines.
• Texture is a set of primitive texels in some regular or repeated relationship.
• Model based texture analysis techniques generate an empirical model of each pixel
in the image based on a weighted average of the pixel intensities in its
neighborhood. The estimated parameters of the image models are used as textural
feature descriptors.
• Transform based texture analysis techniques convert the image into a new form
using the spatial frequency properties of the pixel intensity variations. The success
of this type lies in the type of transform used to extract textural characteristics from
the image.
 Statistical textural features
• One of the simplest approaches for describing texture is to use the
statistical moments of the gray level histogram of the image. The
various statistical textural features are based on gray level histogram,
gray level co-occurrence matrix.
 Histogram based features
• The histogram-based features are first order statistics that include mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis.
• Let z be a random variable denoting image gray levels and p(zi), i = 0,1,2,3,…….L-1, be the corresponding histogram, where
L is the number of distinct gray levels. The features are calculated using the above-mentioned histogram.
(a) Mean
The mean gives the average gray level of each region and it is useful only as a rough idea of intensity not really texture.
𝐿−1
𝑚= 𝑖=0 𝑧𝑖 𝑝(𝑧𝑖 )
(b) Variance
The variance gives the amount of gray level fluctuations from the mean gray level value.
𝐿−1
𝑖=0 (𝑧𝑖 −𝑚) 𝑝(𝑧𝑖 )
2
𝜇2 (𝑧) =
(c) Skewness
Skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the gray levels around the sample mean. If skewness is negative, the data are
spread out more to the left of the mean than to the right. If skewness is positive, the data are spread out more to the right.
𝐿−1
𝑖=0 (𝑧𝑖 −𝑚) 𝑝(𝑧𝑖 )
3
𝜇3 (𝑧) =
(d) Kurtosis
Kurtosis is a measure of how outlier-prone a distribution is. It describes the shape of the tail of the histogram.
𝐿−1
𝑖=0 (𝑧𝑖 −𝑚) 𝑝(𝑧𝑖 )
4
𝜇4 (𝑧) =
 Co-occurrence matrix based features
• The second-order gray level probability distribution of a texture image can be calculated by
considering the gray levels of pixels in pairs at a time. A second-order probability is often called a
GLC probability.
• The various features that can be calculated from the co-occurrence matrices (C) are inertia
(contrast), absolute value, inverse difference, energy, and entropy.

(a) Contrast
Contrast is the element difference moment of order 2, which has a relatively low value when the high
values of C are near the main diagonal.

𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑠𝑡 = (𝑖 − 𝑗)2 𝐶𝑖𝑗

𝑖 𝑗
(b) Energy
Energy value is highest when all values in the co-occurrence matrix are all equal.

𝐸𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑦 = 𝐶𝑖𝑗2
𝑖 𝑗
(c) Entropy
Entropy of the image is the measure of randomness of the image gray levels.

𝐸𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑝𝑦 = − 𝐶𝑖𝑗 𝑙𝑜𝑔2 𝐶𝑖𝑗

𝑖 𝑗
GLCM – Grey level co-occurrence matrix