Analysis and Classification of Natural Rock Textures based on New Transform-based Features

Abstract

This work develops a mathematical method to extract relevant information about natural rock textures to address the problem of automatic classification. Classical methods of texture analysis cannot be directly applied in this context, since rock textures are typically characterized by both stationary patterns (a classic kind of texture) and geometric forms, which are not properly captured with conventional methods. Due to the presence of these two phenomena, a new classification approach is proposed in which each rock texture class is individually analyzed developing a specific low-dimensional discriminative feature. For this task, multi-scale transform domain representations are adopted, allowing the analysis of the images at several levels of scale and orientation. The proposed method is applied to a database of digital photographs acquired in a porphyry copper mining project, showing better performance than state-of-the-art techniques, and additionally presenting a low computational cost.