Patterns and textures are defining characteristics of many natural objects: a
shirt can be striped, the wings of a butterfly can be veined, and the skin of
an animal can be scaly. Aiming at supporting this analytical dimension in image
understanding, we address the challenging problem of describing textures with
semantic attributes. We identify a rich vocabulary of forty-seven texture terms
and use them to describe a large dataset of patterns collected in the wild.The
resulting Describable Textures Dataset (DTD) is the basis to seek for the best
texture representation for recognizing describable texture attributes in
images. We port from object recognition to texture recognition the Improved
Fisher Vector (IFV) and show that, surprisingly, it outperforms specialized
texture descriptors not only on our problem, but also in established material
recognition datasets. We also show that the describable attributes are
excellent texture descriptors, transferring between datasets and tasks; in
particular, combined with IFV, they significantly outperform the
state-of-the-art by more than 8 percent on both FMD and KTHTIPS-2b benchmarks.
We also demonstrate that they produce intuitive descriptions of materials and
Internet images.

通过创建 Describable Textures Dataset（DTD），使用 47 种纹理术语，将 IFV 应用于纹理识别，以认识和描述大型野外纹理数据集。这种方法不仅提高了纹理识别数据集的性能，而且也极大地提高了材料识别数据集的性能。