Abstract: We generated a new dataset of digital natural images where each colour plane corresponds to the human LMS (long-, medium-, short-wavelength) cone activations. The images were chosen to represent five different visual environments (eg forest, seaside, mountain snow, urban, motorways) and were taken under natural illumination at different times of day. At the bottom-left corner of each picture there was a matte grey ball of approximately constant spectral reflectance (across the camera's response spectrum,) and nearly Lambertian reflective properties, which allows to compute (and remove, if necessary) the illuminant's colour and intensity. The camera (Sigma Foveon SD10) was calibrated by measuring its sensor's spectral responses using a set of 31 spectrally narrowband interference filters. This allowed conversion of the final camera-dependent RGB colour space into the Smith and Pokorny (1975) cone activation space by means of a polynomial transformation, optimised for a set of 1269 Munsell chip reflectances. This new method is an improvement over the usual 3 × 3 matrix transformation which is only accurate for spectrally-narrowband colours. The camera-to-LMS transformation can be recalculated to consider other non-human visual systems. The dataset is available to download from our website.

Abstract: In two previous experiments [Parraga et al, 2009 J. of Im. Sci. and Tech 53(3) 031106; Benavente et al,2009 Perception 38 ECVP Supplement, 36] the boundaries of basic colour categories were measured.
In the first experiment, samples were presented in isolation (ie on a dark background) and boundaries were measured using a yes/no paradigm. In the second, subjects adjusted the chromaticity of a sample presented on a random Mondrian background to find the boundary between pairs of adjacent colours.
Results from these experiments showed significant dierences but it was not possible to conclude whether this discrepancy was due to the absence/presence of a colourful background or to the dierences in the paradigms used. In this work, we settle this question by repeating the first experiment (ie samples presented on a dark background) using the second paradigm. A comparison of results shows that
although boundary locations are very similar, boundaries measured in context are significantly dierent(more diuse) than those measured in isolation (confirmed by a Student’s t-test analysis on the subject’s answers statistical distributions). In addition, we completed the mapping of colour name space by measuring the boundaries between chromatic colours and the achromatic centre. With these results we completed our parametric fuzzy-sets model of colour naming space.

Abstract: The assumption that the retina’s main objective is to provide a minimum entropy representation to higher visual areas (ie efficient coding principle) allows to predict retinal filtering in space–time and colour (Atick, 1992 Network 3 213–251). This is achieved by considering the power spectra of natural images (which is proportional to 1/f2) and the suppression of retinal and image noise. However, most studies consider images within a limited range of lighting conditions (eg near noon) whereas the visual system’s spatial filtering depends on light intensity and the spatiochromatic properties of natural scenes depend of the time of the day. Here, we explore whether the dependence of visual spatial filtering on luminance match the changes in power spectrum of natural scenes at different times of the day. Using human cone-activation based naturalistic stimuli (from the Barcelona Calibrated Images Database), we show that for a range of luminance levels, the shape of the retinal CSF reflects the slope of the power spectrum at low spatial frequencies. Accordingly, the retina implements the filtering which best decorrelates the input signal at every luminance level. This result is in line with the body of work that places efficient coding as a guiding neural principle.

Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an
area by the luminance of surrounding areas. Although V1 is traditionally regarded as
an area mostly responsive to retinal information, neurophysiological evidence
suggests that it may explicitly represent brightness information. In this work, we
investigate possible neural mechanisms underlying brightness induction. To this end,
we consider the model by Z Li (1999 Computation and Neural Systems10187-212)
which is constrained by neurophysiological data and focuses on the part of V1
responsible for contextual influences. This model, which has proven to account for
phenomena such as contour detection and preattentive segmentation, shares with
brightness induction the relevant effect of contextual influences. Importantly, the
input to our network model derives from a complete multiscale and multiorientation
wavelet decomposition, which makes it possible to recover an image reflecting the
perceived luminance and successfully accounts for well known psychophysical
effects for both static and dynamic contexts. By further considering inverse problem
techniques we define induction-reversed images: given a target image, we build an
image whose perceived luminance matches the actual luminance of the original
stimulus, thus effectively canceling out brightness induction effects. We suggest that
induction-reversed images may help remove undesired perceptual effects and can
find potential applications in fields such as radiological image interpretation

Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an area by the luminance of surrounding areas. Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that brightness information might be explicitly represented in V1, in contrast to the more common assumption that the striate cortex is an area mostly responsive to sensory information. Here we investigate possible neural mechanisms that offer a plausible explanation for such phenomenon. To this end, a neurodynamical model which is based on neurophysiological evidence and focuses on the part of V1 responsible for contextual influences is presented. The proposed computational model successfully accounts for well known psychophysical effects for static contexts and also for brightness induction in dynamic contexts defined by modulating the luminance of surrounding areas. This work suggests that intra-cortical interactions in V1 could, at least partially, explain brightness induction effects and reveals how a common general architecture may account for several different fundamental processes, such as visual saliency and brightness induction, which emerge early in the visual processing pathway.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to revisit an old theory of texture perception and
update its computational implementation by extending it to colour. With this in mind we try to capture the optimality of perceptual systems. This is achieved in the proposed approach by sharing well-known early stages of the visual processes and extracting low-dimensional features that perfectly encode adequate properties for a large variety of textures without needing further learning stages. We propose several descriptors in a bag-of-words framework that are derived from different quantisation models on to the feature spaces. Our perceptual features are directly given by the shape and colour attributes of image blobs, which are the textons. In this way we avoid learning visual words and directly build the vocabularies on these lowdimensionaltexton spaces. Main differences between proposed descriptors rely on how co-occurrence of blob attributes is represented in the vocabularies. Our approach overcomes current state-of-art in colour texture description which is proved in several experiments on large texture datasets.

Abstract: The impressive performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) when solving different vision problems is shadowed by their black-box nature and our consequent lack of understanding of the representations they build and how these representations are organized. To help understanding these issues, we propose to describe the activity of individual neurons by their Neuron Feature visualization and quantify their inherent selectivity with two specific properties. We explore selectivity indexes for: an image feature (color); and an image label (class membership). Our contribution is a framework to seek or classify neurons by indexing on these selectivity properties. It helps to find color selective neurons, such as a red-mushroom neuron in layer Conv4 or class selective neurons such as dog-face neurons in layer Conv5 in VGG-M, and establishes a methodology to derive other selectivity properties. Indexing on neuron selectivity can statistically draw how features and classes are represented through layers in a moment when the size of trained nets is growing and automatic tools to index neurons can be helpful.

Abstract: In this work, we study the suitability of high dynamic range, wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) objective quality metrics to assess the perceived deterioration of compressed images encoded using the hybrid log-gamma (HLG) method, which is the standard for HDR television. Several image quality metrics have been developed to deal specifically with HDR content, although in previous work we showed that the best results (i.e., better matches to the opinion of human expert observers) are obtained by an HDR metric that consists simply in applying a given standard dynamic range metric, called visual information fidelity (VIF), directly to HLG-encoded images. However, all these HDR metrics ignore the chroma components for their calculations, that is, they consider only the luminance channel. For this reason, in the current work, we conduct subjective evaluation experiments in a professional setting using compressed HDR/WCG images encoded with HLG and analyze the ability of the best HDR metric to detect perceivable distortions in the chroma components, as well as the suitability of popular color metrics (including ΔITPR , which supports parameters for HLG) to correlate with the opinion scores. Our first contribution is to show that there is a need to consider the chroma components in HDR metrics, as there are color distortions that subjects perceive but that the best HDR metric fails to detect. Our second contribution is the surprising result that VIF, which utilizes only the luminance channel, correlates much better with the subjective evaluation scores than the metrics investigated that do consider the color components.

Abstract: Computational color constancy is a fundamental prerequisite for many computer vision applications. This paper presents a survey of many recent developments and state-of-the- art methods. Several criteria are proposed that are used to assess the approaches. A taxonomy of existing algorithms is proposed and methods are separated in three groups: static methods, gamut-based methods and learning-based methods. Further, the experimental setup is discussed including an overview of publicly available data sets. Finally, various freely available methods, of which some are considered to be state-of-the-art, are evaluated on two data sets.