First- and Second-Order Sorted Local Binary Pattern Features for Grayscale-Inversion and Rotation Invariant Texture Classification

Local binary pattern (LBP) is sensitive to inverse grayscale changes. Several methods address this problem by mapping each LBP code and its complement to the minimum one. However, without distinguishing LBP codes and their complements, these methods show limited discriminative power. In this paper, we introduce a histogram sorting method to preserve the distribution information of LBP codes and their complements. Based on this method, we propose first- and second-order sorted LBP (SLBP) features which are robust to inverse grayscale changes and image rotation. The proposed method focuses on encoding difference-sign information and it can be generalized to embed other difference-magnitude features to obtain complementary representations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for texture classification under (linear or nonlinear) grayscale-inversion and rotation changes.