Texture, a significant visual attribute in images, has been extensively investigated across various image recognition applications. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which have been successful in many computer vision tasks, are currently among the best texture analysis approaches. On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been surpassing the performance of CNNs on tasks such as object recognition, causing a paradigm shift in the field. However, ViTs have so far not been scrutinized for texture recognition, hindering a proper appreciation of their potential in this specific setting. For this reason, this work explores various pre-trained ViT architectures when transferred to tasks that rely on textures. We review 21 different ViT variants and perform an extensive evaluation and comparison with CNNs and hand-engineered models on several tasks, such as assessing robustness to changes in texture rotation, scale, and illumination, and distinguishing color textures, material textures, and texture attributes. The goal is to understand the potential and differences among these models when directly applied to texture recognition, using pre-trained ViTs primarily for feature extraction and employing linear classifiers for evaluation. We also evaluate their efficiency, which is one of the main drawbacks in contrast to other methods. Our results show that ViTs generally outperform both CNNs and hand-engineered models, especially when using stronger pre-training and tasks involving in-the-wild textures (images from the internet). We highlight the following promising models: ViT-B with DINO pre-training, BeiTv2, and the Swin architecture, as well as the EfficientFormer as a low-cost alternative. In terms of efficiency, although having a higher number of GFLOPs and parameters, ViT-B and BeiT(v2) can achieve a lower feature extraction time on GPUs compared to ResNet50.

该研究采用21个不同的预训练Vision Transformer架构，评估其在纹理识别中的性能，并与卷积神经网络和手工设计模型进行比较。结果显示，Vision Transformers在纹理识别方面通常优于卷积神经网络和手工设计模型，尤其在使用更强的预训练和处理来自互联网的纹理任务时表现突出。其中，ViT-B with DINO pre-training，BeiTv2，Swin architecture以及EfficientFormer被认为是更具潜力的模型。此外，尽管GFLOPs和参数数量较高，ViT-B和BeiT(v2)在GPU上的特征提取时间比ResNet50更短，从而实现了更高的效率。

纹理分析中视觉Transformer特征提取的比较调查