Variance Ranklets: Orientation-selective rank features for contrast modulations

We introduce a novel type of orientation–selective rank features that are sensitive to contrast modulations (second–order stimuli). Variance Ranklets are designed in close analogy with the standard Ranklets, but use the Siegel–Tukey statistics for dispersion instead of the Wilcoxon statistics. Their response shows the same orientation selectivity pattern of Haar wavelets on second–order signals that are not detectable by linear filters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first family of rank filters designed to detect orientation in variance modulations. We validate our descriptors with an application to texture classification over a subset of the VisTex and Brodatz databases. The combination of standard (intensity) Ranklets with Variance Ranklets greatly improves on the performance of Ranklets alone. Comparison with other published results shows that state–of–the–art recognition rates can be achieved with a simple Nearest Neighbour classifier.