A Rotation Invariant HOG Descriptor for Tire Pattern Image Classification

Texture feature is important in describing tire pattern image which provides useful clue in solving crime cases and traffic accidents. In this paper, we propose a novel texture feature extraction method based on HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) and dominant gradient (DG) in tire pattern images, named HOG-DG. The proposed HOG-DG is not only robust to illumination and scale changes but also is rotation-invariant. In the proposed HOG-DG, HOG features are first computed from circular local cells, and HOG features from an image are concatenated and normalized using the DG to construct the HOG-DG feature. HOG-DG is used to train a support-vector-machine (SVM) classifier for tire pattern classification. Experimental results demonstrate its outstanding performance for tire pattern description.