Classification with color and texture: jointly or separately?

Current approaches to color texture analysis can be roughly divided into two categories: methods that process color and texture information separately, and those that consider color and texture a joint phenomenon. In this paper, both approaches are empirically evaluated with a large set of natural color textures. The classification performance of color indexing methods is compared to gray-scale and color texture methods, and to combined color and texture methods, in static and varying illumination conditions. Based on the results, we argue that color and texture are separate phenomena that can, or even should, be treated individually.