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Agradeço ao meu orientador, o Professor Eduardo Cardoso de Abreu, pela oportunidade de desenvolvimento deste trabalho, pela a seriedade e o compromisso com a pesquisa, pelos conhecimentos compartilhados e, principalmente, pela dedicação e apoio durante todo o mestrado e doutorado.Agradeço aos meus colegas de pesquisa pelas importantes e enriquecedoras discussões, em especial a Abel A.

This work proposes a novel method based on a pseudo-parabolic diffusion process to be employed for texture recognition. The proposed operator is applied over a range of time scales giving rise to a family of images transformed by nonlinear filters. Therefore each of those images are encoded by a local descriptor (we use local binary patterns for that purpose) and they are summarized by a simple histogram, yielding in this way the image feature vector. The proposed approach is tested on the classification of well established benchmark texture databases and on a practical task of plant species recognition. In both cases, it is compared with several state-of-the-art methodologies employed for texture recognition. Our proposal outperforms those methods in terms of classification accuracy, confirming its competitiveness. The good performance can be justified to a large extent by the ability of the pseudo-parabolic operator to smooth possibly noisy details inside homogeneous regions of the image at the same time that it preserves discontinuities that convey critical information for the object description. Such results also confirm that model-based approaches like the proposed one can still be competitive with the omnipresent learningbased approaches, especially when the user does not have access to a powerful