Study of image features between carved Thangka and embroidered Thangka

Thangka is a representative of Tibetan religion and culture, and it is a typical kind of intangible cultural heritage also. The paper studies the similarities and differences between carved Thangka and embroidered Thangka images based on highlight, shadow and edge information. Three novel features are proposed, Consistency of Illumination Direction (CID), Distribution of Highlight and Shadow near Edge (DHSE) and Edge Similarity under Different Channels (ESDC), and the distribution of Tangka image samples in these feature spaces is analyzed. Experiments and analysis show that compared with the color and texture features, the features proposed in this paper have strong expression ability in distinguishing two kinds of Thangka images.