A New Feature Set for Texture-Based Classification of Remotely Sensed Images in a Quantum Framework

Texture feature extraction plays a crucial role in land-use and land-cover (LULC) classification for the remotely sensed images. However, when these images are quantized to a limited number of gray levels to reduce data volume or noise, conventional texture descriptors often lose discriminative power. This study investigates singular values of the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) as novel texture features for image classification, with local binary pattern (LBP), complete LBP (CLBP) statistics, and original GLCM features proposed by Haralick et al. for comparison. Under coarse quantization, texture descriptors of LBP and its variants, which encode micro-texture, lose detail, whereas GLCM, which encodes macro-texture, retains structural co-occurrence patterns. This study thus proposes a new feature set, namely the Singular Values of the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (SVGM), for texture discrimination. Experimental analysis indicates SVGM achieves higher class separability by preserving dominant spatial structure while suppressing noise and redundancy. Quantitative evaluation using classical SVMs with multiple kernels, quantum learning models with different kernels, and neural baselines (ANN and 1D-CNN) further shows that SVGM consistently improves classification performance. Within our tested models, quantum kernel SVMs are competitive and achieve the best results on some datasets, while classical models perform best on others.