The statistics of gray-level differences have been successfully used in a n
umber of texture analysis studies. In this paper we propose to use signed g
ray-level differences and their multidimensional distributions for texture
description. The present approach has important advantages compared to earl
ier related approaches based on gray level cooccurrence matrices or histogr
ams of absolute gray-level differences. Experiments with difficult texture
classification and supervised texture segmentation problems show that our a
pproach provides a very good and robust performance in comparison with the
mainstream paradigms such as cooccurrence matrices, Gaussian Markov random
fields, or Gabor filtering. (C) 2001 Pattern Recognition Society. Published
by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.