Texture provides a rich source of information about the natural scene. For designers, a texture adds richness to a design. For computer scientists, a texture is attractive not only because it is an important component in image analysis for solving a wide range of applied recognition, segmentation and synthesis problems, but also it provides a key to understanding basic mechanisms that underlie human visual perception.
A fundamental goal of texture research in computer vision is to develop automated computational methods for retrieving visual information and understanding image content based on textural properties in images. The critical issues in realising the goal include understanding human texture perception and deriving appropriate quantitative texture descriptions.
This chapter provides an overview of texture research during the advancement of this field in the past several decades. Particularly, definitions of texture, the main schools of texture analysis approaches, and related applications are surveyed. The motivation of this study and the structure of the thesis are also presented.