Is there any texture in the image?

Texture analysis methods have been used in various image processing tasks, such as image segmentation, recognition, shape analysis, texture synthesis, and image compression. When applying any of these methods, we assume that the input image has some textural characteristics. This paper addresses the problem of deciding whether an image has texture; in other words, whether texture-based methods are suitable for processing the image. We define a texture to have a spatially uniform distribution of local gray-value variations. A fast algorithm for detecting regions that have texture according to this definition is presented. The performance of the method is demonstrated on several synthetic and natural images.