Local complex features learned by randomized neural networks for texture analysis

Texture is a visual attribute largely used in many problems of image analysis. Many methods that use learning techniques have been proposed for texture discrimination, achieving improved performance over previous handcrafted methods. In this paper, we present a new approach that combines a learning technique and the complex network (CN) theory for texture analysis. This method takes advantage of the representation capacity of CN to model a texture image as a directed network and then uses the topological information of vertices to train a randomized neural network. This neural network has a single hidden layer and uses a fast learning algorithm to learn local CN patterns for texture characterization. Thus, we use the weights of the trained neural network to compose a feature vector. These feature vectors are evaluated in a classification experiment in four widely used image databases. Experimental results show a high classification performance of the proposed method compared to other methods, indicating that our approach can be used in many image analysis problems.