ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Signal Process., 23 November 2023

Sec. Image Processing

Volume 3 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/frsip.2023.1271769

Bounds for Haralick features in synthetic images with sinusoidal gradients

  • Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, United States

Abstract

Introduction: The gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) reduces the dimension of an image to a square matrix determined by the number of gray-level intensities present in that image. Since GLCM only measures the co-occurrence frequency of pairs of gray levels at a given distance from each other, it also stores information regarding the gradients of gray-level intensities in the original image.

Methods: The GLCM is a second-order statical method of encoding image information and dimensionality reduction. Image features are scalars that reduce GLCM dimensionality and allow fast texture classification. We used Haralick features to extract information regarding image gradients based on the GLCM.

Results: We demonstrate that a gradient of k gray levels per pixel in an image generates GLCM entries on the kth parallel line to the main diagonal. We find that, for synthetic sinusoidal periodic gradients with different wavelengths, the number of gray levels due to intensity quantization follows a power law that also transpires in some Haralick features. We estimate bounds for four of the most often used Haralick features: energy, contrast, correlation, and entropy. We find good agreement between our analytically predicted values of Haralick features and the numerical results from synthetic images of sinusoidal periodic gradients.

Discussion: This study opens the possibility of deriving bounds for Haralick features for targeted textures and provides a better selection mechanism for optimal features in texture analysis applications.

1 Introduction

Image processing can be performed in dual spaces, such as the Fourier transform or image space. Direct imaging allows the fastest possible information retrieval for image classification. Among the many properties of an image, texture is the most often used for classification. “Texture is an innate property of virtually all surfaces, the grain of wood, the weave of a fabric, the pattern of crops in a field, etc. […] Texture can be evaluated as being fine, coarse, or smooth; rippled, moiled, irregular, or lineated” (). The critical assumption in texture analysis and classification based on the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) introduced by Haralick is that “…texture information in an image I is contained in the overall or ‘average’ spatial relationship which the gray tones in the image have to one another” ().

The initial applications of Haralick features used photomicrographs of sandstone and aerial photographs and satellite images to classify types of stone and determine land-use categories (; ). From the beginning, Haralick’s features were also applied in medical imaging to enable personalized medicine by taking advantage of clinical imaging data. The first automatic screening texture-based analysis for identifying and classifying pneumoconiosis was developed by . Although they did not use Haralick features for classification, they established that only invariant measures of pixel relationships should be used for medical diagnosis. ) and ) also noted that the most valuable features for texture classifications are the angular second moment, entropy, sum entropy, difference entropy, information measure of correlation, and the maximal correlation features that are due to gray-level quantization invariance. Recent advances in machine learning and AI have led to novel approaches in X-ray radiodiagnosis which are primarily focused on optimized versions of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) (). The first automatic system based on Haralick features used digitized lung X-rays and identified black lung disease with 96% accuracy (; ), while physician accuracy varies from 86% to 100% (). Although the nomenclature was not yet standardized at the time of the first large-scale pneumoconiosis study () using Haralick features (; ), the five features used for patient classification were “autocorrelation” (similar to the normalized correlation feature f3 from Eq. 10), the “moment of inertia” (similar to the contrast feature f2 from Eq. 9), a similarity feature (similar to inverse difference momentum f5 from Eq. 12), a conditional entropy (similar to the entropy feature f9 from Eq. 16), and “another dissimilarity measure” (similar to the contrast feature except using absolute value instead of the square distance between gray levels in GLCM). The volume of radiation oncology on radiographic images for diagnosis and treatment is increasing exponentially. It requires new fast direct imaging analysis, such as segmentation and texture analysis based on Haralick features (). All medical imaging modalities (CT, MRI, PET, and ultrasound) display the image as grayscale, and the image features (as many as a couple of thousand) are extracted for classification in machine learning-assisted image processing (; Wang et al., 2022; ). Radiomic texture features were applied to images to classify pulmonary nodules as benign or malignant, with a correct classification rate of 90.6% in 1999 (McNitt-Gray et al., 1999). McNitt-Gray et al. (1999) first identified the most relevant Haralick features in pulmonary nodule classification. They found that a reasonable (over 90%) classification accuracy can be obtained with only three features: contrast, sum entropy, and difference variance. Their study also highlighted that the selection of displacement vectors is critical for classification accuracy. Non-oncological classification tasks in the kidneys alone have included differentiation between benign and malignant lesions and lipid-poor angiomyolipomas from renal cell carcinoma (RCC) (Raman et al., 2014; Yan et al., 2015; ; ; ). Classification tasks have also successfully classified lesions in the liver, pancreas, and bowel (Song et al., 2014; Raman et al., 2015; Permuth et al., 2016; ; ). The texture features outperformed standard uptake value (SUV) parameters in PET scan images, including mean SUV, maximum SUV, peak SUV, metabolic tumor volume, and total lesion glycolysis (; ). Texture features are helpful for image contouring, tissue identification, classification tasks, disease staging, treatment response prediction, disease-free survival, overall survival estimation, risk stratification, response classification, and real-time response monitoring. Among the most used features in medical imaging are first-order statistical descriptors (mean, range, and standard deviation), shape descriptors, and texture features (). In addition to direct imaging-based features such as Haralick’s, there are also wavelet-based feature filter banks (; Soufi et al., 2018; Prinzi et al., 2023).

In addition to biomedical imaging, Haralick features have been applied to detecting intrusion to mitigate cybersecurity attacks (; ). Intrusion detection algorithms identify unauthorized intruders and attacks on various electronic devices and systems such as computers, network infrastructures, and ad hoc networks (; ).

Crowd abnormality detection, such as for flash mobs, is a public safety concern, and real-time identification and intervention are crucial for reducing casualties (Sivarajasingam et al., 2003; ). The difficulty of crowd abnormality detection is the great amount of data feeds available. By some estimates, there is one surveillance camera per 35 people in the United Kingdom (Serrano Gracia et al., 2015) combined with a very low human accuracy of 19% for detecting abnormalities while simultaneously observing four video feeds (Voorthuijsen et al., 2005). The default video tracking algorithm is based on the optical flow method (), which has significant drawbacks when applied to crowds (Wang and Xu, 2016). A considerable data dimensionality reduction was obtained using GLCM (Ryan et al., 2011), which allowed the fast detection of abnormalities ().

1.1 Gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM)

Throughout this study, the pixel coordinate definition originates at the top-left corner of an image with the x-direction horizontal to the right and a y-direction vertically downward (Figure 1A). As a result, the matrix representation of an image has its first (line) index associated with the y-direction and the second (column) index with the x-direction, that is, I (line index, column index) = I (y, x) (Figure 1B). An image I (y, x) of size Ny × Nx gives the intensity at location (pixel) of coordinates (y, x) by discrete numbers from light intensity quantization levels. For example, the b = 2-bit encoding of intensity for the Ny(=3) × Ny(=4) image shown in Figure 1B allows for gray levels of image intensity quantization that correspond to different gray levels from black (0) to white (3).

FIGURE 1

The gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) counts the number of occurrences of the reference gray level i at a distance specified by the horizontal and vertical increments d = (Δy, Δx) from the gray level j ():where # denotes the number of elements in the set, the coordinates of the reference gray level i are (yi, xi), and the coordinates of the neighbor pixel with gray level j are (yj = yi + Δy, xj = xi + Δx). In GLCM, the first index is the reference or starting point of the displacement vector d. For example, an offset d = (Δy = 0, Δx = 1) means that the row index (y-direction) does not change because Δy = 0 and the column index increases (x-direction) by one unit (Δx = 1), that is, the new location is the horizontal nearest neighbor to the right of the reference pixel, as shown by the shaded ellipses for i = 1, j = 0 in Figure 1B. The corresponding GLCM for d = (0, 1) is shown in Figure 1C. Similarly, an offset d = (Δy = −1, Δx = 0) means that the row index (y-direction) decreases by one unit (vector pointing vertically upward), and the column index is constant. The pairs are upward vertical nearest neighbors, as shown by the shaded rectangles in Figure 1B and the corresponding GLCM in Figure 1D. In their seminal paper on GLCM features, ) focused on the eight nearest neighbors of the reference pixel in Figure 1 and used the magnitude |d| of the displacement vector d = (Δy, Δx) and the corresponding angle θ = tan−1yx) to the nearest neighbor.

Although it is common practice in GLCM evaluation to consider toroidal periodic boundary conditions, we did not use them in this study. In the original definition of GLCM given by ), there is a symmetry that allows both 1,2 and 2,1 pairings to be counted as the number of times the value 1 is adjacent to the value 2. Here, we used a stricter approach to define the occurrence matrix that does not double count such occurrences; consequently, our GLCMs are not always symmetric.

GLCM belongs to the class of second-order statistical methods for image analysis and is based on the joint probability distribution of gray-level intensities at two image pixels. The first-order statistic is based on the image histogram and the statistical values, such as mean image intensity, standard deviation, and skewness. The justification of the GLCM method is based on experiments on the human visual system that showed that “…no texture pair can be discriminated if they agree in their second-order statistics” ().

The number of possible pairs in the image often normalizes GLCM. For example, in an Nx × Ny image, there are Rx = (Nx − 1)Ny horizontal pairs and Ry = (Ny − 1)Nx vertical pairs with a displacement vector d of one unit. In the example shown in Figure 1, since the image is 3 × 4 pixels, the GLCM normalization factors are Rx = 9 and Ry = 8. The corresponding normalized GLCM values in Figure 1C are, for example, p(1, 0) = P(1, 0)/Rx = 2/9 and for Figure 1D are p(2, 0) = P(2, 0)/Ry = 2/8. In the following, un-normalized GLCM is labeled with capital letters such as P(i, j), whereas its normalized version is labeled p(i, j). The advantage of the normalized GLCM is that, regardless of the size of the image or the number of gray levels, .

Haralick features have received much recent attention due to the advance of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms capable of accurately and quickly classifying textures over a wide range of applications, such as biomedical imaging (; ; ; Wang et al., 2022; ; ; ; ; Nakata and Siina, 2023; Prinzi et al., 2023), cybersecurity (; ; ; ), or crowd abnormality (Sivarajasingam et al., 2003; ; Naik and Gopalakrishna, 2017). However, beyond five-decade-old definitions (), little progress has been made on the theoretical and analytical understanding of Haralick features, deriving theoretical lower and upper bounds, the dependence of GLCM and Haralick features on image depth, and other related issues. We started this study by observing that Haralick features are measures of light intensity gradients in images. To derive bounds for Haralick features, we determined the symmetries of GLCM induced by the linear gradients present in images. Such symmetries allowed us to estimate the marginal probabilities (Section 2) necessary for analytically estimating Haralick feature bounds. We then generated synthetic gradients, such as vertical stripes of different gray-level intensities, and compared our theoretical predictions against numerical calculations of Haralick features. While we used all 14 Haralick features (Section 2), only four are relevant to the synthetic patterns we investigated (Section 3). We also showed that some features, like contrast and homogeneity, are redundant for the synthetic images generated.

2 Methods: Haralick GLCM features

The un-normalized GLCM P(i, j) gives the number of occurrences of gray level j at a distance Δx and Δy from the current location of the reference pixel with gray level i in an image. Assuming that there are gray levels in the image, normalized GLCM is the matrix:with the obvious property that .

2.1 Marginal probability distributions

The x-direction marginal probability distribution, or marginal row probability, can be obtained by summing the rows of GLCM p(i, j):as shown in Figure 2A. For example, px(0) is the sum of all row elements with intensity i = 0 at the reference point, or the starting point of displacement vector d in Figure 1A regardless the intensity of its endpoint neighbors. Similarly, the mean and variance of GLCM along px(i) are as follows:

FIGURE 2

The y-direction marginal probability distribution, or marginal column probability, can be obtained by summing the columns of GLCM p(i, j)as shown in Figure 2B. For example, py(0) is the sum of all column elements with an endpoint intensity i = 0 (Figure 1A) regardless the intensity of the reference (starting) point.

The marginal distribution of a given contrast k = |ij| between the reference pixel intensity i and endpoint neighbor intensity j is as follows:where δm,n is Kronecker’s delta symbol. For example, pxy(0) is the sum of all GLCM entries along the primary diagonal because these elements have no contrast between the reference i and the endpoint j of the vector d (Figure 2C). Similarly, the sum of GLCM entries along the first-order diagonal parallel to the primary diagonal has a contrast of k = ji = 1 between the reference i and the endpoint j of GLCM and determines the element pxy(1) of the marginal distribution pxy.

The marginal distribution of a given sum of gray-level intensity k = i + j between the reference pixel intensity i and the endpoint neighbor intensity j isand can be visualized as corresponding sums along the secondary diagonals (Figure 2D).

2.2 Haralick texture features

While there is no standard notation for Haralick features, we will follow the original (

;

).

  • 1) Angular second momentum (ASM) or energy is a measure of the homogeneity of the image and is defined as

When pixels are very similar, the ASM value will be large. For a quantization scheme with

gray levels, a uniform image has only one entry in GLCM, which gives the maximum

f1

= 1. For a purely random-filled image, all entries of the

GLCM matrix are equally represented with

. Consequently, the minimum value is

. This statistic, also called “uniformity”, measures textural uniformity and pixel pair repetitions; it detects disorders in textures. Energy reaches a maximum value equal to 1. High energy values occur when the gray-level distribution is constant or periodic. Energy has a normalized range; GLCM of a less homogeneous image will have many small entries. Energy is preferred to entropy as its values belong to the normalized range.

  • 2) Contrast (CON) measures local variations present in the image and is defined as

When

i

and

j

are equal, there is no contrast

k

=

j

i

between pixels; therefore,

pxy

(

k

) has weight

k

= 0 in

f2

along the primary diagonal of GLCM. If

k

= |

i

j

| = 1, there is a small contrast between neighbor pixels, and

pxy

(

k

) contributes a weight of 1 to

f2

. The weight of

pxy

(

k

) increases quadratically as the contrast

k

= |

i

j

| increases. For example, if only the primary diagonal elements of the GLCM are populated, then the contrast is minimum

f2

= 0. This feature measures the variation between neighboring pixels (larger differences get square law weights). It can also be viewed as a measure of the spread of values in the GLCM matrix. Contrast is associated with the average gray level difference between neighboring pixels and is similar to variance. However, contrast is preferred due to reduced computational load and its effectiveness as a spatial frequency measure. Energy and contrast are the most significant parameters for visual assessment and computational load to discriminate between textural patterns.

  • 3) Correlation (COR) is a measure of the linear dependency of gray levels of neighboring pixels and is defined as

COR describes how a reference pixel is related to its neighbor: 0 is uncorrelated and 1 is perfectly correlated. This measure is similar to the familiar Pearson correlation coefficient.

  • 4) Variance (VAR)

Variance is a measure of the dispersion of the values around the mean of combinations of reference and neighbor pixels. This feature assigns increasing weight to greater gray-value differences. The mean value μ was not defined in Haralick’s original studies and is given by

This statistic measures heterogeneity and correlates with first-order statistical variables such as standard deviation. Variance increases when the gray-level values differ from their mean.

  • 5) Inverse difference momentum (IDM) or homogeneity measures the local homogeneity and has a high value when the local gray level is uniform. Its definition is as follows:

IDM measures the closeness of the distribution of the GLCM elements to the GLCM diagonal. The IDM weight value is the inverse of the contrast weight, with weights decreasing quadratically away from the diagonal. Sometimes, a new homogeneity measure is used:

. The homogeneity value is high when the GLCM matrix is populated mainly along the diagonal. Therefore, homogeneity measures the closeness of the distribution of elements of GLCM to the GLCM diagonal. It measures image homogeneity as it assumes larger values for smaller gray-tone differences in pair elements. It is more sensitive to near diagonal elements in GLCM. It has a maximum value when all elements in the image are the same. GLCM contrast and homogeneity are strongly, but inversely, correlated in terms of equivalent distribution in the pixel pair population, meaning that homogeneity decreases if contrast increases while energy is kept constant.

  • 6) Sum Average (SA)

Sum average measures the sum of the average of all gray levels.

  • 7) Sum variance (SV)

Sum variance is a measure of heterogeneity that places higher weights on neighboring intensity level pairs that deviate more from the mean. The uniform (flat) distribution of the sum of gray levels has maximum entropy.

  • 8) Sum entropy (SE)

Sum entropy is a measure of non-uniformity in the image or the complexity of the texture.

  • 9) Entropy

Entropy takes on its maximum value when a probability distribution is uniform (completely random texture), and its minimum value is 0 when it becomes deterministic (all grayscale values in the image are identical). If the entropy

f9

is defined using the base-2 logarithm log

2

(), then

f9

is measured in bits. Entropy measures the disorder of an image and achieves its greatest value when all elements in the GLCM matrix are equal. The entropy measure is also called the “Shannon diversity”. It is high when the pixel values of GLCM have varying values. Entropy is inversely proportional to the angular second moment; this statistic measures the disorder or complexity of an image. Entropy is large when the image is not texturally uniform—many GLCM elements have very small values. Complex textures tend to have high entropy: entropy is strongly but inversely correlated with energy.

  • 10) Difference variance (DV)

where the difference average (DA) is given by

. The difference variance measure is defined as the variance of

pxy

in a manner similar to its sum counterpart. It is the variance of difference of gray levels.

  • 11) Difference entropy (DE)

Difference entropy measures the randomness or lack of structure or order in the image contrast. The uniform (flat) distribution of the difference of gray levels has maximum entropy.

  • 12) Information Measures of Correlation Feature 1

where

,

, and

. Information measures of correlation are correlations of various parameters measured using different techniques. Mutual information is normalized. Information correlation is set to infinity if the denominator is 0.

  • 13) Information Measures of Correlation Feature 2

where

. This measure is the difference between joint entropy

f9

and joint entropy assuming independence HXY

2

.

f13

also assesses the correlation between the probability distributions of

i

and

j

(quantifying the complexity of the texture). Note that

HXY1

=

HXY2

and that

HXY2

HXY

≥ 0 represents the mutual information on the two distributions. Therefore, 0 ≤

f13

< 1, with 0 representing the case of two independent distributions (no mutual information) and the maximum value representing the case of two fully dependent and uniform distributions (maximal mutual information).

  • 14) Maximal correlation coefficient

where

.

Q

can be viewed as the transition matrix for a Markov chain of neighboring pixel gray levels. The maximal correlation coefficient relates to how fast the Markov chain converges; it measures the texture’s complexity and 0 ≤

f14

≤ 1.

3 Results

GLCM and Haralick features are challenging to interpret as they have second-order statistical correlation characteristics among pixels. Here, we provide a detailed analytical and computational analysis of synthetic images to gain insights into the GLCM’s meaning. Since Haralick features are based on pairwise distribution along different directions in the image, the most fundamental type of texture is a gradient of gray levels (Figures 3A1 or 3A2). Consequently, gradients of different intensities (in gray levels per pixel) will be found along the corresponding lines parallel to the principal (main) diagonal of GLCM. For example, if there is no gradient along a particular direction (uniform gray-level intensity), the respective pixels will contribute only to the main diagonal. A gradient of one gray level per pixel in a given direction will only contribute to the first line parallel to the main diagonal of GLCM (Figure 3C1), as explained in detail in the following.

FIGURE 3

3.1 From image patterns to GLCM patterns

3.1.1 Horizontal displacement vectors and GLCM entries for constant gradients of gray levels

Although the results are valid for an arbitrary number of gray levels, we could only produce a manageable size GLCM fitting the printed page by using a b = 2-bit gray-level image with the fixed number of lines Ny = 100, similar to the case shown in Figure 1. The most straightforward synthetic images are composed of vertical lines with a horizontal gradient of gray-level intensities: first vertical line of intensity 2b − 1 = 3, the next vertical line of intensity 2, and so on. In this case, the gradient is one gray level per pixel along the horizontal direction with the “natural” displacement vector d = (Δy, Δx) = (0, 1) (Figure 3A1). As the synthetic image in Figure 3A1 is scanned from left to right, we noticed that, first, there is a gray-level transition for 3 to 2, P(3, 2) = 1, followed by P(2, 1) = 1 until we reached the lowest gray level with P(1, 0) = 1 (Figure 3B1). One gray level per pixel gradient allows one-to-one mapping between gray levels and the number of horizontal pixels Nx. As Figure 1C1 shows, the aforementioned sequence P(3, 2), P(2, 1), and P(1, 0) is a negative gradient that corresponds to the first parallel line below the main, or primary, diagonal of GLCM, with the starting point at the lower-right corner of the matrix P(3, 2) and the endpoint at the top-left corner P(1, 0). As one continues reading the gray levels in Figure 1B1, the gradient becomes positive, and new entries P(0, 1), P(1, 2) and P(2, 3) complete the periodic structure observed in Figure 1A1. These new values of the positive gradient correspond to the first parallel line above the main, or primary, diagonal of GLCM, with the starting point at the top corner of the matrix with P(0, 1) and the endpoint at the bottom corner P(2, 3). One complete period of the one gray level per pixel gradient shown in Figures 3A1, A1 produces GLCM entries circling clockwise around the main diagonal of GLCM (Figure 3c1). The images in Figures 3A1, A2 were rendered in color to emphasize the differences between gray-level stripes. Because the image in Figure 3A1 has Ny = 100 identical lines, the actual values of GLCM are multiplied by Ny. If the gradient structure repeats Mx times along the x-direction, then the un-normalized GLCM elements are multiples of Mx. For example, the pattern in Figure 3A1 repeats twice along the horizontal direction.

The wavelength, λ of the periodic structure marked in Figure 3A1 is λ = Nx/Mx pixels, which can be determined more generally as the ratio of the image size Nx × Ny divided by the factor that multiplies GLCM. For the 2-bit depth image in Figure 3A1, the actual grayscale values are shown in Figure 3B1. GLCM for the first wavelength λ in Figure 3A1 is shown in Figure 3C1. There are no diagonal elements in GLCM (Figure 3C1), and they can only occur in two different ways. The first possibility is that a vertical stripe, like that shown in Figures 3A1, A2, is more than one pixel wide. For example, in Figure 3A1 and the numerical example shown in Figure 3B1, the line of gray level 3 has a width w3 larger than one pixel and contributes w3 − 1 times to the diagonal element P (3, 3). In this example, the gray level 3 of the first wavelength λ is followed by a vertical strip of the same gray level value from the next wavelength— w3 = 2. Consequently, GLCM for the entire image shown in Figure 3A1 includes P(3, 3) = (w3 − 1)*Ny = 1*100 (Table 1) which accounts for the fact that there is a two-pixel-wide vertical strip of gray level 3 in Figure 3A1.

TABLE 1

0123
0020000
120002000
202000200
300200100

GLCM for the entire image in Figure 3A1 with a horizontal displacement vector d =(Δy, Δx)=(0,1), i.e., rightward displacement, or d =(0,−1), i.e., leftward displacement.

3.1.2 Bit depth reduction of images and their effect on GLCM

Bit depth reduction can occur during image compression or other image processing operations that require casting the image intensity to a lower depth. Therefore, the second possibility for generating a non-zero diagonal element in the GLCM is a bit depth reduction (Figure 3A2) where the original image from Figure 3A1 was reduced from 2-bit (four gray levels) to 1-bit (two gray levels) depth. Such a bit depth reduction is generated by dropping the least significant digit in the binary representation of the gray levels. The bit depth reduction is a convolution of the higher depth intensity GLCM with a 2 × 2 non-overlapping kernel, as shown in Figure 3C1 with the shaded rectangles. All occurrences involving gray levels 0 and 1 in the 2-bit depth GLCM, such as P(0, 0), P(0, 1), P(1, 0), and P(1, 1) in the 2-bit GLCM shown in Figure 3C1, collapse to gray level 0 after depth reduction to 1-bit. This convolution is suggested in Figure 3C1 by the symbol Σ along the arrow that maps the 2 × 2 kernel into the new GLCM values shown in Figure 3C2. For clarity, we insert a subscript to GLCM to indicate its bit depth, such that

Similarly, gray levels 2 and 3 in the 2-bit image depth shown in Figure 3A1 collapse to the new gray level 1 in the 1-bit image shown in Figure 3A2.

3.1.3 Vertical displacement vectors and the GLCM entries for constant gradients of gray levels

GLCM of Figure 3A1 along the vertical direction with a displacement vector d = (Δy, Δx) = (−1, 0) or d = (Δy, Δx) = (1, 0) contains only diagonal elements as there is no gray level gradient along the vertical direction (Table 2). For example, there is only one vertical strip of gray level 0 on the first wavelength λ, marked in Figure 3A1, which contains P(0, 0) = (Ny − 1) = 99 gray level pairs of 0 and 0 intensities along the vertical direction (see Table 2).

TABLE 2

0123
099000
1019800
2001980
3000198

GLCM for the entire image in Fig. 3a1 with a vertical displacement vector d =(Δy, Δx)=(−1,0), i.e., downward displacement, or d =(1,0), i.e., upward displacement.

Therefore, a zero gradient—no change in gray level—along a given displacement vector leads to non-zero main diagonal elements in GLCM. A gradient of one gray level per pixel leads to non-zero elements along the first upper and lower parallel lines to the main diagonal, as seen in Figure 3C1 and Table 1. Similarly, a gradient of two gray levels per pixel would lead to non-zero GLCM values for P(0, 2), P(1, 3), P(3, 1), and P(2, 0), which are elements along the second upper and lower parallel lines to the main diagonal.

Because GLCM is a lower-dimensional matrix representation of the original Nx × Ny image, it is always ambiguous, and the original image can never be recovered from its GLCM. Furthermore, GLCM cannot distinguish between diagonal elements due to spatially extended regions of uniform intensity and a bit-depth reduction. For example, GLCM shown in Figure 3C2 cannot distinguish based on the diagonal elements P1bit (0, 0) = 200 if this value comes from a vertical stripe with width w0 = 3 (Figure 3B2) and length Ny = 101—a one-pixel-wide stripe of length 201 pixels—or a bit depth reduction (Figure 3C1).

3.2 From GLCM patterns to Haralick features

Section 3.1 shows the relationship between patterns, such as gray-level gradients, in images and the structure of GLCM. Haralick features (Section 2) represent another level of dimension reductions as the entire GLCM is reduced to a single numerical value.

Given that a dimension reduction produces a feature that is even more ambiguous than GLCM, it being impossible to infer the original image patterns, we focus here on the following:

FIGURE 4

In the following, we only review some of the most frequently used and relevant Haralick’s features and make theoretical predictions regarding their values in the aforementioned two cases that are amenable to analytic solutions. All our analytical derivations were subsequently checked by numerical simulations using synthetic textures. For all numerical simulations, we generated synthetic images where the gray levels vary sinusoidally along the horizontal direction according to sin (2πx/λ) where x is the pixel index from 1 to Nx = 1,024, as shown in Figures 4A (for λ = 10 pixels) and B (for λ ≈ 200 pixels).

3.2.1 Gray-level quantization of sinusoidal gradients of variable wavelength

While all sine waves cover b = 8-bit depth gray levels as seen in Figure 4C, the quantization of gray levels dramatically depends on the number of cycles Mx that can fit into Nx = 1,024 horizontal pixels. For short wavelength λ (Figure 4A), for example, in λ = 10 pixels, corresponding to Mx = Nx/λ ≈ 100 cycles in Figure 4C, there are distinct quantization levels for gray-level intensity—249, 202, 53, 6, and 127— marked ‘A’ in Figure 4D along the lower straight line in the log–log plot. In the following, to distinguish between the dynamic range of the 8-bit image and the actual number of distinct gray levels due to the quantization effect, we added a tilde, as in , for periodic vertical stripes with sinusoidal changing intensity with a wavelength of λ = 10 pixels in the 1,024 × 1,024 image (Figures 4A, B). For a longer wavelength λ (Figure 4B), such as λ = 15 pixels, corresponding to Mx = Nx/λ ≈ 68 cycles in Figure 4C, there are distinct quantization levels for gray-level intensity—179, 222, 249, 254, 238, 202, 154, 101, 53, 17, 1, 6, 33, 76, and 127—marked ‘B’ in Figure 4D along the upper straight line in the log–log plot. The two parallel lines in the log–log plot of Figure 4D are determined by rounding sin (2πx/λ) when mapped into 8-bit gray levels. The power law for the curve starting at ‘A’ that determines the actual number of distinct gray levels out of the maximum possible is given bywith an RMSE value of 1.3326 and an adjusted R2 = 0.9995. For the alternative line that starts at ‘B’,with an RMSE value of 2.0835 and an adjusted R2 = 0.9990.

3.2.2 Analytical estimates for energy feature

In the following, we provide analytical estimates of how a bit reduction affects GLCM and the corresponding Haralick feature. While some Haralick features are normalized, such as correlation, most are not, and there are no theoretical lower and upper bounds in the literature. We provide systematic derivations of bounds for each of the selected features along (a) vertical displacement vectors, (b) horizontal displacement vectors, and (c) after a random reshuffling of image pixels.

3.2.2.1 Bit-depth reduction affects angular second momentum (ASM) or energy

Based on Eq. 8, the lowest ASM corresponds to a random distribution of gray levels and the maximum to a uniform image. As previously noted, reducing the image’s bit depth by one unit makes every new entry in the lower-depth GLCM the sum of the elements in 2 × 2 sub-arrays from the higher-depth GLCM. Using Eq. 22, one finds . Expanding the sums inside the parenthesis gives f1,1bit = f1,2bit + 2× (all products of two factors in every parenthesis), which means f1,1bitf1,2bit. Therefore, bit depth reduction can only increase the value of ASM.

3.2.2.2 Lower and upper bounds for angular second momentum (ASM) or energy
3.2.2.2.1 Vertical displacement vectors

A log–log plot of the ASM, or energy, feature for the original image Figure 5A1 shows that its value is constant across all images for the vertical displacement vectors (green solid circles and blue crosses). This is expected as GLCM for the vertical strips (Table 2) has only diagonal elements with little to no change as we add more vertical stripes. For such homogeneous patterns, such as single pixel-wide vertical stripes measured along the vertical displacement vector, the GLCM diagonal entries are , which gives .

FIGURE 5

3.2.2.2.2 Horizontal displacement vectors

GLCM along the horizontal displacement direction is similar to Table 1, where most occurrences are parallel to the main diagonal. For horizontal displacement vectors and a very short wavelength of λ = 10 pixels, we previously found (Figure 4) that there are only gray levels in the vertical strip pattern images—249, 202, 53, 6, and 127. As a result, the only non-zero entries in GLCM along the horizontal displacement vector are p(249, 202), p(202, 53), p(53, 6), p(6, 127), and p(127, 249) and their transpose values—such as p(202, 249)—for a total of values. Therefore, assuming that each of the gray levels is only represented by a one-pixel-wide vertical strip; this gives . For example, for λ = 10 and , we get f1 = 0.1, which is close to the data shown in Figure 5A1 (red stars and solid black squares). There are a few variations due to rounding that change the aforementioned prediction: (1) some quantization levels are so broad that distinct values of the sine wave sin (2πx/λ) fall under the same gray level (e.g., pixels 2 and 3 for λ = 10 pixels that are mapped to gray level 249 and pixels 7 and 8 mapped to gray level 6 in Figure 4C); (2) some rounding produces very similar but distinct gray levels, such as pixel 5 with gray level 128 and pixel 10 with gray level 127 in Figure 4C. The first type of rounding does not change the number of gray levels but rather gives more weight to some of them, increasing the energy. The second type of rounding increases the number of gray levels and decreases the energy associated with the pattern. Such small rounding differences produce the fluctuations evident in Figure 5A1.

3.2.2.2.3 Random reshuffling of pixels

The energy of all displacement vectors for randomly reshuffling the pixels in the image is the same and very low, as expected (Section 2). Indeed, for a random distribution of pixel intensities, we expect which gives as seen in Figure 7A1.

To summarize, the lower bound of the angular second momentum (ASM) or energy is , which occurs for a random reshuffle of image pixels (Section 3.2.2.2.3). The upper bounds depend on the type of pattern. For homogeneous patterns such as those shown in Figure 3 along the vertical displacement vector, the upper bound is (Section 3.2.2.2.1). For periodic patterns such as those shown in Figure 3 along the horizontal displacement vector, the upper bound is (Section 3.2.2.2.2).

3.2.3 Bound estimates for contrast feature

3.2.3.1 Bit depth reduction effect on contrast

While most Haralick features are based on GLCM p (i, j), the contrast is based on the GLCM subset pxy(k) of elements parallel to that primary diagonal (Eq. 9). If all elements of GLCM are along the primary diagonal at a given bit depth of pxy (0) = 1, then the contrast is f2 = 0 and will be 0 for all subsequent depth-reduced images. The contrast continuously decreases by bit-depth reduction— f2,1bitf2,2bit. For example, assuming that all elements of 2-bit GLCM are distributed to achieve maximum contrast of 3—pxy,2bit (3) = 1—then the contrast is f2,2bit = 32. A 1-bit depth reduction means that the maximum contrast is 1 and pxy,2bit (1) = 1, which gives f2,1bit = 12.

3.2.3.2 Lower and upper bounds bit for contrast
3.2.3.2.1 Vertical displacement vectors

In such cases, the only elements of the occurrence matrix are along the main diagonal, which means that the contrast in Figure 5A2 is 0 (not shown due to the log–log scale).

3.2.3.2.2 Horizontal displacement vectors

The contrast along the horizontal displacement vector increases with the number of cycles, Mx. This is because a larger number of cycles means that the 8-bit gray levels will fit on a smaller scale, leading to a larger gradient k = |ij| between gray levels—the GLCM entries will be aligned parallel to the main diagonal, but farther from it. As a result, the contrast increases (Figure 5A2). Based on Eq. 9, un-normalized Table 3 and the corresponding normalized GLCM entries in Table 4, all GLCM entries along the contrast lines k = ji = ±1 have the same weight of Mx/(7Mx − 1), which leads to f2 = 6Mx/(7Mx − 1).

TABLE 3

0123
00100Mx00
1100Mx0100Mx0
20100Mx0100Mx
300100Mx100 (Mx − 1)

GLCM for Mx wavelengths is similar to Figure 3A1 with a horizontal displacement vector d =(Δy, Δx)=(0,1) or d =(0,−1).

TABLE 4

0123
0000
100
200
300

Normalized GLCM of Table 3 entries for Mx wavelengths shown in Figure 3A1 with a horizontal displacement vector d = (Δy, Δx) = (0,1) or d = (0, −1).

3.2.2.2.3 Random reshuffling of pixels

For a random reshuffling of pixels in the synthetic image, we expect , which gives, according to Figure 2C, for the corresponding contrast vector . Based on Eq. 9, one gets = . As the number of gray levels increases, the contrast of a random distribution of pixels increases almost linearly with the number of gray levels . For an 8-bit image with the actual number of gray levels , the contrast reaches approximately 85, whereas, for shorter wavelengths such as λ = 10 pixels with , the theoretically estimated contrast is approximately 1.6. The numerical results for the contrast shown in Figure 5B2 for randomly reshuffling the pixels in the vertically stripes images are lower than the theoretical prediction because of the small rounding fluctuations discussed in Section 3.2.2 that produce deviations from the ideally assumed distribution of GLCM values.

In summary, the upper bound of the contrast is always (Section 3.2.3.2.3). The lower bound depends on the patterns. The lower bound is zero for uniform patterns (see Section 3.2.3.2.1), as seen in Figure 3A1 along the vertical displacement vector. For periodic patterns like those shown in Figure 3A1 along the horizontal displacement vector, the lower bound is 6Mx/(7Mx − 1) (Section 3.2.3.2.2).

3.2.4 Bound estimates for correlation feature

3.2.4.1 Bit depth reduction effect on correlation

A cursory inspection of Eq. 10 shows a dramatic decrease in the correlation feature f3 by bit depth reduction. For example, the un-normalized correlation sum is for a 1-bit image is . According to the bit depth reduction discussion in the previous subsection, p1bit (1, 1) = p2bit (2, 2) + p2bit (2, 3) + p2bit (3, 2) + p2bit (3, 3). On the other hand,

3.2.4.2 Lower and upper bounds for correlation
3.2.4.2.1 Vertical displacement vectors

For a one-unit vertical displacement vector in the vertically striped images shown in Figure 3, the only entries in GLCM are along the main diagonal such that p(i, i) = (Ny − 1)/((Ny − 1)Nx) = 1/Nx. Because of the GLCM symmetry, the x-direction marginal probability distribution px(i) and for y-direction py(i) are equal at . Consequently, . The variances are also equal = = = . Along the GLCM diagonal i = j, so the un-normalized correlation sum is , which gives a normalized correlation COR = 1 as seen in Figure 5C1.

3.2.4.2.2 Horizontal displacement vectors

To further simplify the calculations, one assumes that the image has a one gray-level per pixel gradient along the x-direction (Figure 3). To further simplify the evaluation of the correlation for periodic patterns shown in Figure 3, we only consider one period, Mx = 1 in Table 4. As a result, the marginal probabilities are px = py = (1, 2, … , 2, 1), and the non-zero GLCM entries are aligned only along the two symmetric contrast lines k = ji = ±1 with equal probability (Table 4). The mean values required in Eq. 10 are . Similarly, the variances are . The un-normalized correlation sum along the two non-zero lines of contrast k = ji = ±1 (Table 4) is . The normalized correlation is = .

The un-normalized correlation sum is , which gives a normalized correlation COR = 1 (Figure 5C1).

3.2.4.2.3 Random reshuffling of pixels

Randomly reshuffling of the pixels in an image gives , , = = = and COR = 0 (Figure 5C2).

In summary, the lower bound of the correlation is always 0, as seen from Section 3.2.4.2.3. The upper bound of f3 depends on the specific patterns. For uniform patterns, such as Figure 3 along the vertical displacement vector, the correlation feature is a maximum of f3, max = 1, as shown in Section 3.2.4.2.1. For periodic patterns, such as those shown in Figure 3 along the horizontal displacement vector, the correlation feature depends on the gray-level quantization (or the wavelength of the pattern) and is as shown in Section 3.2.4.2.2. In agreement with this derived formula, Figure 5C1 shows that the correlation feature asymptotically approaches its maximum possible value of f3, max = 1 as the number of gray levels increases.

While theoretical estimates can be derived for any other Haralick feature, as shown previously, entropy is the only other feature of interest.

3.2.5 Bound estimates for entropy feature

3.2.5.1 Bit depth reduction effect on entropy

According to Eq. 16, 1-bit GLCM is . Notice that every p1bit (i, j) term contains four GLCM terms from the 2-bit image, such as p1bit (0, 0) = p2bit (0, 0) + p2bit (0, 1) + p2bit (1, 0) + p2bit (1, 1), and that p1bit (i, j) is larger than any of the 2-bit terms it includes. Consequently, for example, p1bit (0, 0) log (p1bit (0, 0)) = (p2bit (0, 0) + p2bit (0, 1) + p2bit (1, 0) + p2bit (1, 1)) log (p1bit (0, 0)) ≥ p2bit (0, 0) log (p2bit (0, 0)) + p2bit (0, 1) log (p2bit (0, 1)) + p2bit (1, 0) log (p2bit (1, 0)) + p2bit (1, 1) log (p2bit (1, 1)). Applying this inequality to all terms of the 1-bit entropy Eq. 16 results in f9,1bitf9,2bit, which extends by induction.

3.2.5.2 Lower and upper bounds for entropy
3.2.5.2.1 Vertical displacement vectors

Since a vertical displacement vector in a vertically striped image, such as those shown in Figures 4A1, B1, only determines diagonal entries in GLCM as in Figure 3C1, we first consider the simplest possible case of a one gray level per pixel gradient, which means that all diagonal entries are equal and . As a result, the entropy is , which is monotonically increasing for all . For example, for a base-10 logarithm, the entropy for a vertical displacement vector in the 8-bit GLCM should be f9 = log (256) ≈ 2.4, as seen in Figure 5D1 (green dots and blue crosses).

3.2.5.2.2 Horizontal displacement vectors

For horizontal displacement vectors in a vertically striped image, such as those in Figures 4A1, B1, with a gradient of one gray level per pixel, GLCM has elements parallel to the main diagonal (Figure 3C1). For an 8-bit image, the non-zero elements of GLCM should be , giving (Figure 5D1). However, as the wavelength of the periodic patterns decreases and the number of cycles increases (Figures 3A1, A2), the number of available gray levels decreases (Figure 4B2). For example, for a wavelength of λ = 15 pixels, only gray levels repeat in Figures 4A1, B1. The number of cycles is Mx = Nx/λ ≈ 68, meaning that there are only transitions in GLCM among the gray levels, each given by , and each transition repeats Mx time. Thus, the non-zero entries in GLCM equal . Therefore, the entropy is . As shown previously, a power–law relationship exists between and the number of cycles Mx (Figure 4B2). Consequently, such a power law manifests in the entropy plot for horizontal displacement vectors, as shown in Figure 5D1 (red stars and solid black squares symbols), and shows a steady increase for f9 with the number of cycles.

3.2.5.2.3 Random reshuffling of pixels

As with the previous Haralick features, for a random reshuffling of the pixels in an image, and, therefore, the entropy becomes . For an 8-bit image, the entropy of a random distribution of pixels should be f9 = 2 log (256) ≈ 4.8. As noticed from Figure 5D2, the entropy is a bit higher than our estimate and decreases as we increase the number of cycles in the vertically striped pattern shown in Figures 5A1 and B1. Entropy decreases with the number of cycles because, as in Figure 4B2, the number of gray levels in the images in Figures 4A1, B1 is much smaller than the expected 8-bit depth (256 gray levels). For example, for a λ = 15-pixel wavelength pattern, the gray levels are quantized into distinct gray levels (instead of the full range ), which gives entropy of f9 = 2 log (15) ≈ 2.35 for Mx = 68 cycles in Figure 4B2.

In summary, the upper bound of the entropy is always (Section 3.2.5.2.3) for the random reshuffling of the image pixel. The lower bound depends again on the specific patterns. For uniform patterns, such as those shown in Figure 3 along the vertical displacement vector, the entropy feature has the lowest possible value , as seen from Section 3.2.5.2.1. For periodic patterns, such as Figure 3 along the horizontal displacement vector, the entropy feature has an intermediate value between the maximum determined by random reshuffling and a minimum of a uniform image——as seen in Section 3.2.5.2.2.

Figure 6 shows all 14 Haralick features, of which we have discussed in detail only the four most relevant for the patterns shown in Figures 3, 4. All plots are on a semi-log horizontal scale, showing the results for horizontal and vertical unit displacement vectors.

FIGURE 6

The values of the Haralick features in Figure 7 are provided as references. As expected, there are many redundant features, so we have only focused on four. For example, the inverse difference momentum (IDM) of homogeneity featuring f5 in Figure 6A2 is an inverse measure to the contrast discussed in detail in Figure 5B1 (see also Figure 6B1).

FIGURE 7

To avoid cluttering the plots, we also show the same features in Figure 7 after randomly reshuffling the pixels in the original images. We also notice from Figure 7 that the Haralick feature has the same value regardless of the direction of the unit displacement vector.

4 Conclusion

One of the main difficulties in using GLCM and Haralick features, as opposed to Fourier-based spectral methods in signal and image processing, is the fact that the real space mapping of the original signal is lost. Indeed, for example, the Fourier space of a two-dimensional image I(y, x) is a conjugate space i(qy, qx) where the wavenumber qx = 2π/λ is directly related to the spatial size λ of the pattern in the image. Therefore, the Fourier spectrum allows direct mapping of the results back into the image space. Since GLCM and the corresponding Haralick features retain only a relative arrangement of gray-level intensities in an image, they only encode gray-level gradients present in images. While GLCM has the advantage of a simpler interpretation than Fourier spectral analysis, its most significant shortcoming is the quadratic computational complexity () compared to the faster Fourier computation with complexity (Preparata and Sarwate, 1977). Another critical shortcoming of GLCM-based methods is that both GLCM and the Haralick texture feature values depend on the number of gray levels in the quantized image (). Another significant drawback is the high dimensionality of the GLCM matrix and the high correlation of the Haralick features (). This study brings analytical estimates of Haralick features that apply to arbitrary gray-level quantization schemes and directly links the meaning of Haralick features to image gradients.

We found that the structure of GLCM directly encoded the gray-level intensity gradients along a given direction in the image (Section 3.1). In our synthetic images (Figures 3A1, A2, 4A, B) of vertical stripes, the vertical direction has uniform gray levels—zero gradients. We found that a zero gradient along a given direction generates only entries along the main, or principal, diagonal of GLCM for the respective gray level. Each entry along the main diagonal measures the pattern’s size along the displacement vector and its width perpendicular to it. For example, one vertical stripe of gray level 0 with a length of Ny = 100 pixels generates the GLCM entry P(0, 0) = (Ny − 1) = 99 when measured along a vertical displacement vector. If the gray level stripe has a width of w = 2, then the GLCM entry becomes w (Ny − 1) = 198. However, because GLCM does not preserve information about the spatial location of image pixels, it cannot be determined whether the w (Ny − 1) GLCM entry was determined by a single stripe with wNy pixels or by w stripes, each with Ny pixels.

Similarly, we found that a gradient of one gray level per pixel produces only GLCM entries along the first parallel lines to the main diagonal of GLCM (Section 3.1). Furthermore, a positive gradient of one gray level per pixel along the horizontal displacement vector produces GLCM entries that rotate clockwise, such as p(1, 2), followed by p(2, 3), then by p(3, 4), and so on, and they are arranged above the main diagonal. A gradient of two gray levels per pixel will generate GLCM entries along the second parallel lines from the main diagonal.

We also found that bit depth reduction generates diagonal entries in GLCM. Bit depth reduction occurs, for example, during data compression. GLCM cannot distinguish between the effect of bit depth reduction, which blurs the image, versus actual uniform gray-level patches present in the original image. Furthermore, since GLCM is a lower dimensional representation of the original Nx × Ny pixel image, one can never recover from it the original image.

Haralick features reduce the data dimensionality from the of GLCM to a single number. We only selected four of the original 14 Haralick features as they allow the best discrimination of the particular patterns in our synthetic images: angular second momentum (ASM) or energy (Section 3.2.2), contrast (Section 3.2.3), correlation (Section 3.2.4), and entropy (Section 3.2.5).

All four Haralick features analyzed in detail were analytically estimated for uniform random distribution of pixels across the entire image with a given number of gray levels. The actual number of gray levels in a synthetic image can change in two different ways: (1) by bit depth reduction, like changing from 8-bit to 7-bit images, dropping the actual gray-level numbers from 256 to 128, and (2) by changing the wavelength λ of the synthetic pattern that produces a variable number of gray levels due to the quantization of intensities. We investigated the effect of bit depth reduction and wavelength modulation.

Bit depth reduction produces a block shrinking of GLCM similar to a convolution (Figures 3C1, C2). The only difference is that, while convolutions have an odd-size kernel such that they can compute a replacement for the central value based on the neighboring values, a 1-bit depth reduction of GLCM always operates on gray-level values as a 2 × 2 kernel by dropping the least significant bit (Eq. 22).

On the other hand, we found that the gray level quantization of the periodic sin (2πx/λ) for different values of λ produces power–law dependence, such as Eq. 23 (curve ‘A’ in Figure 4D) and Eq. 24 (curve ‘B’ in Figure 4D). Consequently, such power–law dependencies on λ or, equivalently, on the number of cycles Mx = Nx/λ were observed in the four analyzed Haralick features (Figures 5A1–D1) when plotted against the number of cycles.

We provided bounds for Haralick features for the synthetic gradient pattern, allowing a straightforward interpretation of the results for future applications. As real-world textures are more complex than the gradients investigated here, our findings could be generalized and integrated into a systematic approach to the meaningful use of Haralick features for image processing.

Statements

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary material; further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

AO: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, software, supervision, validation, visualization, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing. SO: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, software, supervision, validation, visualization, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the South Carolina Space Grant Consortium partially supported this research. Department of Physics and Astronomy at the College of Charleston covered the publication cost.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Author SO declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and final decision.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors, and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Summary

Keywords

sinusoidal gradient, Haralick features, bit depth reduction, constant gradient, image processing, signal processing, gray-level co-occurrence matrix

Citation

Oprisan A and Oprisan SA (2023) Bounds for Haralick features in synthetic images with sinusoidal gradients. Front. Sig. Proc. 3:1271769. doi: 10.3389/frsip.2023.1271769

Received

02 August 2023

Accepted

20 October 2023

Published

23 November 2023

Volume

3 - 2023

Edited by

Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola, Arizona State University, United States

Reviewed by

Malaya Kumar Nath, National Institute of Technology Puducherry, India

Denis Stanescu, Université Grenoble Alpes, France

Updates

Copyright

*Correspondence: Ana Oprisan,

Disclaimer

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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