This paper presents a flexible shape-based texture method by investigating the co-occurrence patterns of shapes. More precisely, a texture image is represented by a tree of shapes, each of which is associated with several attributes. The modeling of texture is thus converted to characterize the tree of shapes. To this aim, we first learn a set of co-occurrence patterns of shapes from texture images, then establish a bag-of-words model on the learned shape co-occurrence patterns (SCOPs), and finally use the resulted SCOPs distributions as features for texture analysis. In contrast with existing work, the proposed method not only inherits the strong ability to depict geometrical aspects of textures and the high robustness to variations of imaging conditions from the shape-based texture method, but also provides a more flexible way to consider shape relationships and high-order statics on the tree. To our knowledge, this is the first time to use co-occurrence patterns of explicit shapes as a tool for texture analysis. Experiments of texture retrieval and classification on various databases report state-of-the-art results and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.
