Abstract: In this paper, computational methods are proposed to compute color edge saliency based on the information content of color edges. The computational methods are evaluated on bottom-up saliency in a psychophysical experiment, and on a more complex task of salient object detection in real-world images. The psychophysical experiment demonstrates the relevance of using information theory as a saliency processing model and that the proposed methods are significantly better in predicting color saliency (with a human-method correspondence up to 74.75% and an observer agreement of 86.8%) than state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, results from salient object detection confirm that an early fusion of color and contrast provide accurate performance to compute visual saliency with a hit rate up to 95.2%.

Abstract: Extraction of spatio-chromatic features from color images is usually performed independently on each color channel. Usual 3D color spaces, such as RGB, present a high inter-channel correlation for natural images. This correlation can be reduced using color-opponent representations, but the spatial structure of regions with small color differences is not fully captured in two generic Red-Green and Blue-Yellow channels. To overcome these problems, we propose a new color coding that is adapted to the specific content of each image. Our proposal is based on two steps: (a) setting the number of channels to the number of distinctive colors we find in each image (avoiding the problem of channel correlation), and (b) building a channel representation that maximizes contrast differences within each color channel (avoiding the problem of low local contrast). We call this approach more-than-three color coding (MTT) to enhance the fact that the number of channels is adapted to the image content. The higher color complexity an image has, the more channels can be used to represent it. Here we select distinctive colors as the most predominant in the image, which we call color pivots, and we build the new color coding using these color pivots as a basis. To evaluate the proposed approach we measure its efficiency in an image categorization task. We show how a generic descriptor improves its performance at the description level when applied on the MTT coding.

Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper, we present an architecture for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of music compositions contain handwritten text, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The main contribution is therefore the use of features extracted from graphical alphabets. Our proposal consists in combining the identification results of two different approaches, based on line and textural features. The steps of the ensemble architecture are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for removing the staff lines. Then, music lines and texture images are generated for computing line features and textural features. Finally, the classification results are combined for identifying the writer. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 92% with 20 writers.

Abstract: Bag-of-words based image representation is a successful approach for object recognition. Generally, the subsequent stages of the process: feature detection,feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, it was found that the combination of different image cues, such as shape and color, often obtains below expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using ultiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, these color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. In regions with higher attention shape features are given more weight than in regions with low attention. We compare our approach with existing methods that combine color and shape cues on five data sets containing varied importance of both cues, namely, Soccer (color predominance), Flower (color and hape parity), PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 (shape predominance) and Caltech-101 (color co-interference). The experiments clearly demonstrate that in all five data sets our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for combining color and shape information.

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

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel approach to automatic, yet flexible, image concepttransfer; examples of concepts are “romantic”, “earthy”, and “luscious”. The presented method modifies the color content of an input image given only a concept specified by a user in natural language, thereby requiring minimal user input. This method is particularly useful for users who are aware of the message they wish to convey in the transferred image while being unsure of the color combination needed to achieve the corresponding transfer. Our framework is flexible for two reasons. First, the user may select one of two modalities to map input image chromaticities to target concept chromaticities depending on the level of photo-realism required. Second, the user may adjust the intensity level of the concepttransfer to his/her liking with a single parameter. The proposed method uses a convex clustering algorithm, with a novel pruning mechanism, to automatically set the complexity of models of chromatic content. Results show that our approach yields transferred images which effectively represent concepts as confirmed by a user study.