In this paper, the problem of classifying synthetic and natural texture
images is addressed. To tackle this problem, an innovative method is proposed
that combines concepts from corrosion modeling and cellular automata to
generate a texture descriptor. The core processes of metal (pitting) corrosion
are identified and applied to texture images by incorporating the basic
mechanisms of corrosion in the transition function of the cellular automaton.
The surface morphology of the image is analyzed before and during the
application of the transition function of the cellular automaton. In each
iteration the cumulative mass of corroded product is obtained to construct each
of the attributes of the texture descriptor. In a final step, this texture
descriptor is used for image classification by applying Linear Discriminant
Analysis. The method was tested on the well-known Brodatz and Vistex databases.
In addition, in order to verify the robustness of the method, its invariance to
noise and rotation were tested. To that end, different variants of the original
two databases were obtained through addition of noise to and rotation of the
images. The results showed that the method is effective for texture
classification according to the high success rates obtained in all cases. This
indicates the potential of employing methods inspired on natural phenomena in
other fields.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure