  The recognition of color texture under varying lighting conditions is still
an open issue. Several features have been proposed for this purpose, ranging
from traditional statistical descriptors to features extracted with neural
networks. Still, it is not completely clear under what circumstances a feature
performs better than the others. In this paper we report an extensive
comparison of old and new texture features, with and without a color
normalization step, with a particular focus on how they are affected by small
and large variation in the lighting conditions. The evaluation is performed on
a new texture database including 68 samples of raw food acquired under 46
conditions that present single and combined variations of light color,
direction and intensity. The database allows to systematically investigate the
robustness of texture descriptors across a large range of variations of imaging
conditions.
