  Visual textures have played a key role in image understanding because they
convey important semantics of images, and because texture representations that
pool local image descriptors in an orderless manner have had a tremendous
impact in diverse applications. In this paper we make several contributions to
texture understanding. First, instead of focusing on texture instance and
material category recognition, we propose a human-interpretable vocabulary of
texture attributes to describe common texture patterns, complemented by a new
describable texture dataset for benchmarking. Second, we look at the problem of
recognizing materials and texture attributes in realistic imaging conditions,
including when textures appear in clutter, developing corresponding benchmarks
on top of the recently proposed OpenSurfaces dataset. Third, we revisit classic
texture representations, including bag-of-visual-words and the Fisher vectors,
in the context of deep learning and show that these have excellent efficiency
and generalization properties if the convolutional layers of a deep model are
used as filter banks. We obtain in this manner state-of-the-art performance in
numerous datasets well beyond textures, an efficient method to apply deep
features to image regions, as well as benefit in transferring features from one
domain to another.
