Data Augmentation for Genetic Programming-Driven Late Merging of HOG and Uniform LBP Features for Texture Classification

The categorization of texture images requires the identification and extraction of meaningful keypoints, a crucial step in ensuring the precise representation of textured images. The literature has introduced numerous descriptors in order to detect and capture both local and global texture characteristics. These descriptors vary in their effectiveness depending on the specific application. However, it is generally accepted that they complement each other by compensating for their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, many approaches focused on combining different types of image descriptors generating robust features that are invariant to image transformations. These solutions mostly focused on one way to deal with information and faced more problems as they need human intervention and a large set of data. The acknowledged benefits of combining multiple types of descriptors are accompanied by challenges specially. These challenges arise due to differences in properties, such as locality and sparsity, as well as the heterogeneity exhibited by generated features. To address this issue comprehensively, we present an approach that benefits from genetic programming techniques to generate and combine two distinct texture classifiers. It incorporates histograms of oriented gradients and local binary patterns descriptors, which capture different textures. To effectively fuse the results of both classifiers, the proposed approach employs a late fusion process along with data augmentation methods while using a limited amount of training data. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach in texture image classification tasks, we have conducted extensive experiments on six challenging datasets encompassing various variations. We have also investigated its performance in a cross dataset problem where the model has been trained on instances of a dataset before being tested on samples of another dataset. The obtained results clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach surpasses other relevant low-level approaches, as well as existing GP-based and CNN methods specifically designed for describing and classifying textures. Thanks to its ability to simultaneously leverage multiple descriptors, the suggested solution shows a high potential for real-world applications, particularly in handling various image changes with robustness.