Abstract: The proportions of L, M and S photoreceptors in the primate retina are arguably determined by evolutionary pressure and the statistics of the visual environment. Two information theory-based approaches have been recently proposed for explaining the asymmetrical spatial densities of photoreceptors in humans. In the first approach Garrigan et al (2010 PLoS ONE 6 e1000677), a model for computing the information transmitted by cone arrays which considers the differential blurring produced by the long-wavelength accommodation of the eye’s lens is proposed. Their results explain the sparsity of S-cones but the optimum depends weakly on the L:M cone ratio. In the second approach (Penacchio et al, 2010 Perception 39 ECVP Supplement, 101), we show that human cone arrays make the visual representation scale-invariant, allowing the total entropy of the signal to be preserved while decreasing individual neurons’ entropy in further retinotopic representations. This criterion provides a thorough description of the distribution of L:M cone ratios and does not depend on differential blurring of the signal by the lens. Here, we investigate the similarities and differences of both approaches when applied to the same database. Our results support a 2-criteria optimization in the space of cone ratios whose components are arguably important and mostly unrelated.
[This work was partially funded by projects TIN2010-21771-C02-1 and Consolider-Ingenio 2010-CSD2007-00018 from the Spanish MICINN. CAP was funded by grant RYC-2007-00484]

Abstract: Color constancy (the ability to perceive colors relatively stable under different illuminants) is the result of several mechanisms spread across different neural levels and responding to several visual scene cues. It is usually measured by estimating the perceived color of a grey patch under an illuminant change. In this work, we hypothesize whether chromatic adaptation (without a reference white or grey) could be driven by certain colors, specifically those corresponding to the universal color terms proposed by Berlin and Kay (1969). To this end we have developed a new psychophysical paradigm in which subjects adjust the color of a test patch (in CIELab space) to match their memory of the best example of a given color chosen from the universal terms list (grey, red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, orange and brown). The test patch is embedded inside a Mondrian image and presented on a calibrated CRT screen inside a dark cabin. All subjects were trained to “recall” their most exemplary colors reliably from memory and asked to always produce the same basic colors when required under several adaptation conditions. These include achromatic and colored Mondrian backgrounds, under a simulated D65 illuminant and several colored illuminants. A set of basic colors were measured for each subject under neutral conditions (achromatic background and D65 illuminant) and used as “reference” for the rest of the experiment. The colors adjusted by the subjects in each adaptation condition were compared to the reference colors under the corresponding illuminant and a “constancy index” was obtained for each of them. Our results show that for some colors the constancy index was better than for grey. The set of best adapted colors in each condition were common to a majority of subjects and were dependent on the chromaticity of the illuminant and the chromatic background considered.

Abstract: Image retrieval can be dealt by combining standard descriptors, such as those of MPEG-7, which are defined independently for each visual cue (e.g. SCD or CLD for Color, HTD for texture or EHD for edges).
A common problem is to combine similarities coming from descriptors representing different concepts in different spaces. In this paper we propose a color texture description that bypasses this problem from its inherent definition. It is based on a low dimensional space with 6 perceptual axes. Texture is described in a 3D space derived from a direct implementation of the original Julesz’s Texton theory and color is described in a 3D perceptual space. This early fusion through the blob concept in these two bounded spaces avoids the problem and allows us to derive a sparse color-texture descriptor that achieves similar performance compared to MPEG-7 in image retrieval. Moreover, our descriptor presents comprehensive qualities since it can also be applied either in segmentation or browsing: (a) a dense image representation is defined from the descriptor showing a reasonable performance in locating texture patterns included in complex images; and (b) a vocabulary of basic terms is derived to build an intermediate level descriptor in natural language improving browsing by bridging semantic gap