Feature Local Binary Patterns

This chapter presents a Feature Local Binary Patterns (FLBP) method that encodes both local and feature information, where the feature pixels may be broadly defined by, for example, the edge pixels, the intensity peaks or valleys in an image, or new feature information derived from the local binary patterns or LBP. FLBP thus is expected to perform better than LBP for texture description and pattern recognition. For a given pixel and its nearest feature pixel, a distance vector is first formed by pointing from the given pixel to the feature pixel. A True Center (TC), which is the center pixel of a neighborhood, is then located on the distance vector by a TC parameter. A Virtual Center (VC), which replaces the center pixel of the neighborhood, is specified on the distance vector by a VC parameter. FLBP is then defined by comparing the neighbors of the true center with the virtual center. Note that when both the TC and VC parameters are zero, FLBP degenerates to LBP, which indicates that LBP is a special case of FLBP. Other special cases of FLBP include FLBP1 when the VC parameter is zero and FLBP2 when the TC parameter is zero.