A directional texture descriptor via 2D walking ant histogram

A novel texture descriptor, which can be extracted from the major object edges automatically and used for the content-based retrieval in multimedia databases, is presented. The proposed method is adopted from the 2D Walking Ant Histogram, which is in fact a generic shape descriptor recently developed for general purpose multimedia databases. 2D WAH shape descriptor is motivated from the imaginary scenario of a walking ant with a limited line of sight over the boundary of a particular object; eventually each sub-segment is traversed and the process keeps describing a certain line of sight, whether it is a continuous branch or a corner, using individual 2D histograms. In this paper we tuned this approach as an efficient texture descriptor, which achieves a superior performance especially for directional textures. Integrating the whole process as feature extraction module into MUVIS framework allows us to test the mutual performance of the proposed texture descriptor in the context of multimedia indexing and retrieval. © 2007 IEEE