How well does CLIP understand texture?

Abstract

We investigate how well CLIP understands texture in natural images described by natural language. To this end, we analyze CLIP's ability to: (1) perform zero-shot learning on various texture and material classification datasets; (2) represent compositional properties of texture such as red dots or yellow stripes on the Describable Texture in Detail(DTDD) dataset; and (3) aid fine-grained categorization of birds in photographs described by color and texture of their body parts.