Given an arbitrary image, our goal is to segment all distinct
texture subimages. This is done by discovering distinct,
cohesive groups of spatially repeating patterns, called texels,
in the image, where each group defines the corresponding
texture. Texels occupy image regions, whose photometric,
geometric, structural, and spatial-layout properties are
samples from an unknown pdf. If the image contains texture,
by definition, the image will also contain a large number of
statistically similar texels. This, in turn, will give rise to
modes in the pdf of region properties. Texture segmentation
can thus be formulated as identifying modes of this pdf.
To this end, first, we use a low-level, multiscale segmentation
to extract image regions at all scales present. Then, we
use the meanshift with a new, variable-bandwidth, hierarchical
kernel to identify modes of the pdf defined over the
extracted hierarchy of image regions. The hierarchical kernel
is aimed at capturing texel su...