• We develop and make use of several models to
segment marble images into foreground and back-
ground regions, allowing us to extract appropriate
features from each area.
• Study the performance of different foreground es-
timation methods along with color, texture and
structural features and suggest the best method to
use in a real-life, marble classification setting.
2 RELATED WORK
Our work has strong connections with automatic mar-
ble and granite tiles classification (Bianconi et al.,
2012) (Arivazhagan et al., 2005) (Mart
´
ınez-Alajar
´
ın
et al., 2005) (Ar and Akgul, 2008), material recogni-
tion (Leung and Malik, 2001) (Bell et al., 2014) and
visual saliency estimation (Cheng et al., 2015) (Per-
azzi et al., 2012) (Achanta et al., 2009).
Marble and Granite Classification: Marble and
granite tile classification, yet important, is a less stud-
ied topic in the computer vision community. Here,
the aim is to classify tiles on a marble or a granite
stone according to it’s textural and colour appearance.
In (Bianconi et al., 2012), the authors aim at clas-
sifying 12 commercial classes of granite tiles, each
having 4 different tiles, consisting of 48 pieces in to-
tal. They experiment with several different colour and
texture features, coupled with a bunch of classifiers.
Our work is parallel to theirs as we also aim at find-
ing the best setting for classification. However, our
tests are on a larger scale as we use nearly 1000 mar-
ble images from 10 different categories which shows
significant in-class variations. We experiment with
marbles instead of granite tiles. Also, the feature
set they consider has high computational complex-
ity (i.e:, (Lam, 1996)) which can not be utilized by
a real-life system that requires real-time performance
like ours. Another work deals with marble tiles (Ar
and Akgul, 2008), but experiments using only Ga-
bor filters to locate regions of structure information
like veins, spots and swirls. Our work also makes
use of structural features, but we show that structure
alone is not enough for accurate marble classification.
Probably, the most similar work to ours is (Mart
´
ınez-
Alajar
´
ın et al., 2005) which studies marble slab clas-
sification in an industrial setting. They emphasize the
importance of high-quality image acquisition which
also inspired us while collecting the marble classifi-
cation dataset. Their work states that a marble slab
can be classified into 3 distinct categories according
to the quality features designated in the paper. How-
ever, the scale of their experiments is not large (only
3 classes) and works slow for an industrial setting: it
makes extensive use of Principal Component Analy-
sis (Jolliffe, 2002).
Visual Saliency Estimation: Another line of
work we deal with to build our method is visual
saliency estimation (Cheng et al., 2015) (Perazzi
et al., 2012) (Achanta et al., 2009). Visual saliency
estimation aims at locating image regions with a high
probability of human fixations. Throughout our anal-
ysis, we observe that human experts first locate highly
informative image regions that are captured by their
visual attention system (any region that differs from
it’s surround like regions with high textures or struc-
tures like veins, spots, etc.) and use that informa-
tion extensively to classify marbles. Previous stud-
ies on marble tile and slab classification also aimed
at segmenting a marble into texture/non-texture re-
gions, however, in our experiments we have seen that
they are not fast and accurate enough to be used in
an industrial setting. In our work, we make use of
(Achanta et al., 2009), which is a simple yet effective
method to locate salient image regions in real-time.
We define as foreground any region that differs sig-
nificantly from it’s surround, and the overall appear-
ance of the marble image, and the rest as the back-
ground. This enabled us to accurately study different
features that represent foreground (color, texture and
structure) and background (color) separately.
Material Recognition: The last line of work we
consider here is material recognition (Leung and Ma-
lik, 2001) (Bell et al., 2014). Material recognition
is the study of classifying different types of materi-
als to their corresponding categories. The materials
can be concrete, rug, marble, or leather according to
the texture properties of the surfaces. In our work,
the material is marble, and we work on classifying
the type of marble utilizing not only textural proper-
ties, but also color and structure. We believe that our
findings (i.e:, separating foreground and background
regions for classifying marbles) can also be employed
for recognizing different types of materials.
3 DATASET COLLECTION
One of the major contributions of our paper is a
dataset of nearly 1000 images from 10 marble classes.
A pick and place robot is set up, which can load hun-
dreds of marbles on the production line in a limited
time. In the middle of the line, we set up a closed
room with appropriate lighting conditions, where the
light sources and the camera is set up.
Initially, we collected 6000 marble images where
we had 4 experts to annotate each image. We don’t
make each expert study longer than 1 hour, and keep
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