A “Transform Invariant Low-Rank Texture” (TILT) Extractor, referred to as a “TILT Extractor” accurately extracts both textural and geometric information defining regions of low-rank planar patterns from 2D images of a scene, thereby enabling a large range of image processing applications. Unlike conventional feature extraction techniques that rely on point-based features, the TILT Extractor extracts texture regions from an image and derives global correlations or transformations of those regions in 3D (e.g., transformations including translation, rotation, reflection, skew, scale, etc.). These image domain transformations inherently provide information relative to an automatically determinable camera viewing direction. In other words, the TILT Extractor extracts low-rank regions and geometric correlations describing domain transforms of those regions relative to arbitrary camera viewpoints. The TILT Extractor also identifies sparse error in image intensity or other color channels resulting from noise, occlusions or other artifacts, thereby allowing elimination or reduction of such errors in images.