2011 International Conference on Multimedia and Signal Processing
Texel based Regular and Near-regular Texture Characterization
Yan Gui, Mingang Che, Lizhuang Ma
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
ShangHai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Email: guiyan122@sjtu.edu.cn
Abstract—This paper performs a new method for analyzing
regular and near-regular texture, which combines detection of
repeated texels with extraction of spatial organization among
these texels. For obtaining size, position and class of individual
texel in a given texture, we apply an affine transform based
method to estimate the similarity measurement between texels.
In addition, Delaunay triangulation-like method is used to
extract the triangular grid for describing the underlying texture
periodicity. Our method can give further characterization for
such textures when some useful information are computed,
including the distance, direction of two adjacent texels. And
the topology among all texels is also constructed for extracting
the spatial neighborhood relationship of texels. We test our
method on various sample textures, and give an extension on
real images containing a type of such texture. Experimental
results demonstrate that our method for regular and near-
regular texture characterization is feasible and effective.
Keywords-near-regular texture; structural texture analysis;
texel; texture periodicity; affine transform;
I. I NTRODUCTION
Regular and near-regular textures are pervasive, taking
up a large part of man-made and natural world. Follow-
ing the fundamental notion of such texture [1], namely
that it is formed by spatial repetition of texture elements
(called texel). The structure can be characterized by the
repetitive patterns in which texels are arranged according
to a placement rule (called texture periodicity). From the
diversity of texture analysis approaches proposed in the
literature, the identification and detection of texel and its
texture periodicity remain as the most important issues.
These existing approaches can be mainly categorized into
two groups: statistical texture analysis [2], [3] and structural
texture analysis [4], [5]. Although there exists a huge amount
of work for analyzing regular and near-regular textures, both
accurate detection of texels and the quantification of their
periodicity have not been paid much attention yet. Indeed,
such a characterization for regular and near-regular textures
is significantly useful to improve the performance in shape-
from-texture [6], [7], texture synthesis and editing [8], [9],
texture segmentation [10], texture classification [11] and
recognition tasks [12], among others.
In this paper, we describe a new structural method de-
signed to characterize both the texels and the placement
rule for addressing the aforementioned issue. To describe the
978-0-7695-4356-7/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/CMSP.2011.171
Zhihua Chen
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
East China University of Science and Technology, China
Email: czh@ecust.edu.cn
regular and near-regular texture structurally, the procedure
of texture characterization can be further divided into two
aspects. One is detection and classification of the texel.
We use an affine transform based similarity measurement
proposed by Leung and Malik [13] to obtain an accurate de-
tection of texels in textures, including their sizes, positions,
and classes. All potential texels which are surrounded in a
window are detected under the affine deformation model,
and then the approximate sizes of texels can be computed
through iteratively changing the window in size. In addition,
the texels classes also can be determined by comparing the
differences of sizes, intensities and shapes between each pair
of texels.
The other is the extraction of the texture periodicity. To
analyze the spatial placement rule of texels in a texture,
we use a Delaunay triangulation-like method to construct
the topology among all above detected texels, which can
describe a spatial neighborhood characteristic of each texel.
Edges between any pair of adjacent texels can be connected
according to a criterion about ”maximizing smallest angle”
in Delaunay triangulation, and then the final triangular grid is
formed when all of texels are considered. Unlike extracting
a 2D lattice, potential benefits of constructing the triangular
grid considered include the ability to compute the distance
and direction between two adjacent texels, and also to
register the immediate neighborhoods of each texel during
the procedure of the topology construction. In summary, our
overall regular and near-regular textures characterization has
actually associated with both aspects.
II. T EXEL D ETECTION AND C LASSIFICATION
In our method, the objective focuses on finding all texels
and obtaining their sizes, positions and classes in a given
sample texture. An effective method proposed by Leung and
Malik [13] can be used for our texels detection tasks, texels
are spatially tracked to nearby image locations under affine
transform model. A better correspondence (Fig. 1c) can
be constructed by estimating the affine transform between
texels, which gives an accurate similarity measurement for
texels detection. Given two texel patches P1 (x) and P2 (x) =
P1 (Ax + d), they have a highly similarity when minimizing
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the following energy function E: the window until the matching error (Eq. 5) stops decreasing
∑ 2 or the maximum number of iteration is reached. The size of
E(x) = [P1 (Ax + d) − P2 (x)] (1) final window is the size of the texel, and the approximate
{△A, △d} = arg min E(x) (2) position of the texel is the center of the window in the sample
{A,d} texture. And then the class of the detected texel can also
To determine the amount △A and △d, the energy function be determined. The texel has the same class with a texel
(Eq. 1) can be rewritten as the following: of sub-texels set when their difference is the smallest. The
∑ differences should consider size, intensity δI and surface
E≈ (P1 (x) + ∇P1 (x)T △Ax + ∇P1 (x)T △d − P2 (x))2 shape δE . Note that surface shape is inferred using the affine
(3) transform estimation.
When differentiating the parametric energy function (Eq. Figure 1 shows the procedure and final results of texels
3) and setting with respect to the results equal to zero, detection. Texels can be steadily detected by using our
△A and △d can be estimated by solving the yielded linear method, in that we provide a-priori to specify the size of
equations. Here, △A is a matrix and △d is a vector, which the window from Step 1, which the texels is surrounded by
express the linear spatial transformation between two texel windows wholly. In addition, the executive time of texels
patches P1 (x) and P2 (x). detection can be fast improved because all candidates can
We use a modified algorithm for accomplishing the de- be examined with the texels of the sub-texel set in turn.
tection and classification of the texels. For a given sample
texture, the whole process can be summarized as follows: III. T EXTURE PERIODICITY E XTRACTION
Initialization: translate RGB texture into gray texture. This phase mainly deals with searching the placement rule
Step1: construct a set of sub-texels. Each element in this of all detected texels in order to obtain their global orga-
set is the most distinctive texel, choosing from texels with nization, which we call the underlying texture periodicity.
different classes (Fig. 1b). The user-specified class index Unlike the extraction of 2D quadrilateral lattice, a Delaunay
t = 1, 2, 3, ... is assigned to each texel, and record their size triangulation-like method is used to construct the topology
Mt × Nt . among all detected texels to form the final triangular grid.
Step 2: constitute the possible candidates for the repeating The advantage is that we can analyze the spatial neighbor-
texels. The sample texture is divided into several overlapping hood relationships of all texels (called connectivity).
windows according to the sizes of the texels in the sub-texels By using the computed texels positions and regarding all
set. The following second moment matrix is computed at detected texels as a discrete point set, the process of con-
each window for finding all the possible candidates: structing the triangular grid and analyzing the connectivity
of different classes of texels can be described as following:
∑ ∑
M ∑
N
w= ∇I(i, j)∇I T (i, j) (4) Step 1: arbitrarily choose three points to form an initial
i=1 j=1
triangular grid (Fig. 3b) by connecting the edge between two
adjacent points in turn, and marking these chosen points. The
All possible candidates from these overlapped windows can length of the edge is computed according to their positions,
be found when the ratio of the energy which defined as r = which represents the distance between two points. And then
k1 /k2 (k1 > k2 ) is restricted in a user-specified
∑ threshold we record the length, endpoints of each added edges. Note
T . Where, k1 and k2 are two eigenvalues of w. that the same operation can be performed in latter Steps
Step 3: detect and classify all true texels by performing the when adding an edge.
similarity measurement between a candidate and each texel Step 2: add each point which does not marked into
of the sub-texels set in turn. The candidate in the window the initial triangular grid. Firstly, the chosen point and
is a texel if the ratio of the similarity is no more than the another three marked points form a quadrilateral. The three
user-defined threshold τ . The ratio of the similarity E( sim) marked points have the shortest distance from the currently
defined as follows: chosen point. Secondly, we divide the quadrilateral into two
δE
Esim = (5) triangles, and record the edges corresponding to the smallest
δI
√∑ angle in each triangle. Thirdly, the edge can be added if the
2 angle has the maximum value in these triangles. Finally, we
δE = (P1 (Ax + d) − P2 (x)) (6)
√∑ marks the chosen point.
δI = (P1 (x) − P2 (x))
2
(7) Step 3: repeat Step 2 until all residual points to be marked
and generate the final triangular grid (Fig. 3f).
where, δE is the similarity error by computing Eq. 3. δI Step 4: analyze the connectivity among all different
is the difference of the intensity at corresponding position classes of texels from the constructed triangular grid. By
between two texel patches. For accurately determining the making use of the recoded endpoints information of each
size of the detected texel, we can iteratively adjust the size of edge, we can obtain the immediate neighborhoods for each

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texel. And then the spatial neighborhood relationships for
each texel can be found through sorting its immediate
neighborhoods in a counter-clockwise direction.
Figure 2 shows some intermediate results and the final
triangular grid of the given texture. During the whole proce-
dure of extracting the given texture periodicity, we constraint
the angle in triangle is less than 2π/3 to avoid generating
skewed edges (Fig. 3e).
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
All of our experiments are performed on AMD Phe-
nom(tm) 8400 2.10 GHz Triple-Core Processor with 2GB
of main memory by using unoptimized matlab code. Figure
3 shows more results for the characterization of regular and
near-regular textures. These results were generated with the
parameters T ∈ [3, 5] and τ ∈ [0.1, 0.3] for detecting texels.
Four rows represent four types of near-regular textures, and
the given textures keep the structural regularity well in the
first three examples. The spatial arrangement among all
detected texels in the last example can also be determined
even though the texture is irregular.
An extension is provided in Figure 4 to detect texels and
to extract the texture periodicity form real images, which
contain a texture region with the same properties of near-
regular texture. In addition, we also give a comparative study
with method proposed by [4]. Unlike this method, which au-
tomatically extracts the underlying lattice of the near-regular
texture to analyze texture periodicity, our method should
detect all texels in advance and then extract corresponding
triangular grid for constructing their connectivity. By using
our method, we can obtain the intrinsic properties of each
detected texel and the spatial neighborhoods relationships
among all these texels to give further characterization of
near-regular texture.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we describe a new structural approach
for regular and near-regular textures analysis by detecting
the repeated texel and extracting their global periodicity.
The use of affine deformation model can well measure the
similarity between texels, and classify texels by inferring
surface shape. On the other hand, the accurate size of each
texel can be determined after iteratively refining the affine
transform. The Delaunay triangulation-like method used in
our method not only can identify the spatial arrangement
of texels by finding the triangular grid, but also can obtain
useful information by connecting edges between texels. Our
method works well on various near-regular textures and real
images, and the experimental results have demonstrated the
feasibility and efficiency of our method.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the National High Tech-
nology Research and Development Program of China (No.
268
2009AA01Z334), the Natinal Basic Research Project of
China (No. 2011CB302200) and the National Natural Sci-
ence Foundation of China (No.60873136).
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 (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Figure 1. The procedure and final results for texels detection and classification.(a) is a given sample texture. (b) is the sub-texels set. (c) shows the affine
transform between two texel patches. All detected texels are represented by their bounding box in (d), and each point with different color represents its
class in (e). These processes show in color.

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

Figure 2. The procedure of constructing triangular grid. (a) is the discrete point set. (b) is the initialization of the triangular grid. (c) and (d) are the
intermediate results at iterations 6 and iterations 8 respectively. (e) is the triangular grid with skewed edges. (f) is the final triangular grid.

Figure 3. More examples for detecting texels and analyzing their texture periodicity. The first column is the sample textures. Last two columns show the
results by using our method.

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Figure 4. Extension for real images containing near-regular texture. The triangular grid generated by our method is used to describe the texture periodicity
in the third column, and the results obtained by [4] in the fourth column is using 2D quadrilateral lattice.

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