  Features that capture well the textural patterns of a certain class of images
are crucial for the performance of texture segmentation methods. The manual
selection of features or designing new ones can be a tedious task. Therefore,
it is desirable to automatically adapt the features to a certain image or class
of images. Typically, this requires a large set of training images with similar
textures and ground truth segmentation. In this work, we propose a framework to
learn features for texture segmentation when no such training data is
available. The cost function for our learning process is constructed to match a
commonly used segmentation model, the piecewise constant Mumford-Shah model.
This means that the features are learned such that they provide an
approximately piecewise constant feature image with a small jump set. Based on
this idea, we develop a two-stage algorithm which first learns suitable
convolutional features and then performs a segmentation. We note that the
features can be learned from a small set of images, from a single image, or
even from image patches. The proposed method achieves a competitive rank in the
Prague texture segmentation benchmark, and it is effective for segmenting
histological images.
