On the influence of the image normalization scheme on texture classification accuracy

Texture can be a very rich source of information about the image. Texture analysis finds applications, among other things, in biomedical imaging. One of the widely used methods of texture analysis is the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). Texture analysis using the GLCM method is most often carried out in several stages: determination of areas of interest, normalization, calculation of the GLCM, extraction of features, and finally, the classification. Values of the GLCM based features depend on the choice of the normalization method, which was examined in this work. The normalization is necessary, since acquired images often suffer from noise and intensity artifacts. Certainly, the normalization will not eliminate these two effects, however it was demonstrated, that its application improves texture analysis accuracy. The aim of the work was to analyze the influence of different normalization methods on the discriminating ability of features estimated from the GLCM. The analysis was performed both for Brodatz textures and real magnetic resonance data. Brodatz textures were corrupted by three types of distortion: intensity nonuniformity, Gaussian noise and Rician Noise. Three types of normalizations were tested: min- max, 1–99% and $+/-3\sigma$.