Bojana Gajic, Ariel Amato, Ramon Baldrich, & Carlo Gatta. (2019). Bag of Negatives for Siamese Architectures. In 30th British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: Training a Siamese architecture for re-identification with a large number of identities is a challenging task due to the difficulty of finding relevant negative samples efficiently. In this work we present Bag of Negatives (BoN), a method for accelerated and improved training of Siamese networks that scales well on datasets with a very large number of identities. BoN is an efficient and loss-independent method, able to select a bag of high quality negatives, based on a novel online hashing strategy.
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Javier Vazquez, G. D. Finlayson, & Maria Vanrell. (2010). A compact singularity function to predict WCS data and unique hues. In 5th European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging and Vision and 12th International Symposium on Multispectral Colour Science (33–38).
Abstract: Understanding how colour is used by the human vision system is a widely studied research field. The field, though quite advanced, still faces important unanswered questions. One of them is the explanation of the unique hues and the assignment of color names. This problem addresses the fact of different perceptual status for different colors.
Recently, Philipona and O'Regan have proposed a biological model that allows to extract the reflection properties of any surface independently of the lighting conditions. These invariant properties are the basis to compute a singularity index that predicts the asymmetries presented in unique hues and basic color categories psychophysical data, therefore is giving a further step in their explanation.
In this paper we build on their formulation and propose a new singularity index. This new formulation equally accounts for the location of the 4 peaks of the World colour survey and has two main advantages. First, it is a simple elegant numerical measure (the Philipona measurement is a rather cumbersome formula). Second, we develop a colour-based explanation for the measure.
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Ivet Rafegas. (2017). Color in Visual Recognition: from flat to deep representations and some biological parallelisms (Maria Vanrell, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Visual recognition is one of the main problems in computer vision that attempts to solve image understanding by deciding what objects are in images. This problem can be computationally solved by using relevant sets of visual features, such as edges, corners, color or more complex object parts. This thesis contributes to how color features have to be represented for recognition tasks.
Image features can be extracted following two different approaches. A first approach is defining handcrafted descriptors of images which is then followed by a learning scheme to classify the content (named flat schemes in Kruger et al. (2013). In this approach, perceptual considerations are habitually used to define efficient color features. Here we propose a new flat color descriptor based on the extension of color channels to boost the representation of spatio-chromatic contrast that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. However, flat schemes present a lack of generality far away from the capabilities of biological systems. A second approach proposes evolving these flat schemes into a hierarchical process, like in the visual cortex. This includes an automatic process to learn optimal features. These deep schemes, and more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown an impressive performance to solve various vision problems. However, there is a lack of understanding about the internal representation obtained, as a result of automatic learning. In this thesis we propose a new methodology to explore the internal representation of trained CNNs by defining the Neuron Feature as a visualization of the intrinsic features encoded in each individual neuron. Additionally, and inspired by physiological techniques, we propose to compute different neuron selectivity indexes (e.g., color, class, orientation or symmetry, amongst others) to label and classify the full CNN neuron population to understand learned representations.
Finally, using the proposed methodology, we show an in-depth study on how color is represented on a specific CNN, trained for object recognition, that competes with primate representational abilities (Cadieu et al (2014)). We found several parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a significant number of color selectivity neurons throughout all the layers; (b) an opponent and low frequency representation of color oriented edges and a higher sampling of frequency selectivity in brightness than in color in 1st layer like in V1; (c) a higher sampling of color hue in the second layer aligned to observed hue maps in V2; (d) a strong color and shape entanglement in all layers from basic features in shallower layers (V1 and V2) to object and background shapes in deeper layers (V4 and IT); and (e) a strong correlation between neuron color selectivities and color dataset bias.
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M. Danelljan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Michael Felsberg, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2014). Adaptive color attributes for real-time visual tracking. In 27th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1090–1097).
Abstract: Visual tracking is a challenging problem in computer vision. Most state-of-the-art visual trackers either rely on luminance information or use simple color representations for image description. Contrary to visual tracking, for object
recognition and detection, sophisticated color features when combined with luminance have shown to provide excellent performance. Due to the complexity of the tracking problem, the desired color feature should be computationally
efficient, and possess a certain amount of photometric invariance while maintaining high discriminative power.
This paper investigates the contribution of color in a tracking-by-detection framework. Our results suggest that color attributes provides superior performance for visual tracking. We further propose an adaptive low-dimensional
variant of color attributes. Both quantitative and attributebased evaluations are performed on 41 challenging benchmark color sequences. The proposed approach improves the baseline intensity-based tracker by 24% in median distance precision. Furthermore, we show that our approach outperforms
state-of-the-art tracking methods while running at more than 100 frames per second.
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Adria Ruiz, Joost Van de Weijer, & Xavier Binefa. (2014). Regularized Multi-Concept MIL for weakly-supervised facial behavior categorization. In 25th British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: We address the problem of estimating high-level semantic labels for videos of recorded people by means of analysing their facial expressions. This problem, to which we refer as facial behavior categorization, is a weakly-supervised learning problem where we do not have access to frame-by-frame facial gesture annotations but only weak-labels at the video level are available. Therefore, the goal is to learn a set of discriminative expressions and how they determine the video weak-labels. Facial behavior categorization can be posed as a Multi-Instance-Learning (MIL) problem and we propose a novel MIL method called Regularized Multi-Concept MIL to solve it. In contrast to previous approaches applied in facial behavior analysis, RMC-MIL follows a Multi-Concept assumption which allows different facial expressions (concepts) to contribute differently to the video-label. Moreover, to handle with the high-dimensional nature of facial-descriptors, RMC-MIL uses a discriminative approach to model the concepts and structured sparsity regularization to discard non-informative features. RMC-MIL is posed as a convex-constrained optimization problem where all the parameters are jointly learned using the Projected-Quasi-Newton method. In our experiments, we use two public data-sets to show the advantages of the Regularized Multi-Concept approach and its improvement compared to existing MIL methods. RMC-MIL outperforms state-of-the-art results in the UNBC data-set for pain detection.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Portmanteau Vocabularies for Multi-Cue Image Representation. In 25th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Abstract: We describe a novel technique for feature combination in the bag-of-words model of image classification. Our approach builds discriminative compound words from primitive cues learned independently from training images. Our main observation is that modeling joint-cue distributions independently is more statistically robust for typical classification problems than attempting to empirically estimate the dependent, joint-cue distribution directly. We use Information theoretic vocabulary compression to find discriminative combinations of cues and the resulting vocabulary of portmanteau words is compact, has the cue binding property, and supports individual weighting of cues in the final image representation. State-of-the-art results on both the Oxford Flower-102 and Caltech-UCSD Bird-200 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique compared to other, significantly more complex approaches to multi-cue image representation
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Olivier Penacchio. (2011). Mixed Hodge Structures and Equivariant Sheaves on the Projective Plane. MN - Mathematische Nachrichten, 284(4), 526–542.
Abstract: We describe an equivalence of categories between the category of mixed Hodge structures and a category of equivariant vector bundles on a toric model of the complex projective plane which verify some semistability condition. We then apply this correspondence to define an invariant which generalizes the notion of R-split mixed Hodge structure and give calculations for the first group of cohomology of possibly non smooth or non-complete curves of genus 0 and 1. Finally, we describe some extension groups of mixed Hodge structures in terms of equivariant extensions of coherent sheaves. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
Keywords: Mixed Hodge structures, equivariant sheaves, MSC (2010) Primary: 14C30, Secondary: 14F05, 14M25
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Javier Vazquez, & Maria Vanrell. (2009). A new cone activation-based natural images dataset. PER - Perception, 36, 180.
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.
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Hassan Ahmed Sial, Ramon Baldrich, Maria Vanrell, & Dimitris Samaras. (2020). Light Direction and Color Estimation from Single Image with Deep Regression. In London Imaging Conference.
Abstract: We present a method to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source from a single image. Our method is based on two main ideas: (a) we use a new synthetic dataset with strong shadow effects with similar constraints to the SID dataset; (b) we define a deep architecture trained on the mentioned dataset to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source. Apart from showing good performance on synthetic images, we additionally propose a preliminary procedure to obtain light positions of the Multi-Illumination dataset, and, in this way, we also prove that our trained model achieves good performance when it is applied to real scenes.
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Rahat Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Damien Muselet. (2013). Towards multispectral data acquisition with hand-held devices. In 20th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 2053–2057).
Abstract: We propose a method to acquire multispectral data with handheld devices with front-mounted RGB cameras. We propose to use the display of the device as an illuminant while the camera captures images illuminated by the red, green and
blue primaries of the display. Three illuminants and three response functions of the camera lead to nine response values which are used for reflectance estimation. Results are promising and show that the accuracy of the spectral reconstruction improves in the range from 30-40% over the spectral
reconstruction based on a single illuminant. Furthermore, we propose to compute sensor-illuminant aware linear basis by discarding the part of the reflectances that falls in the sensorilluminant null-space. We show experimentally that optimizing reflectance estimation on these new basis functions decreases
the RMSE significantly over basis functions that are independent to sensor-illuminant. We conclude that, multispectral data acquisition is potentially possible with consumer hand-held devices such as tablets, mobiles, and laptops, opening up applications which are currently considered to be unrealistic.
Keywords: Multispectral; mobile devices; color measurements
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Naila Murray, Maria Vanrell, Xavier Otazu, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2013). Low-level SpatioChromatic Grouping for Saliency Estimation. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 35(11), 2810–2816.
Abstract: We propose a saliency model termed SIM (saliency by induction mechanisms), which is based on a low-level spatiochromatic model that has successfully predicted chromatic induction phenomena. In so doing, we hypothesize that the low-level visual mechanisms that enhance or suppress image detail are also responsible for making some image regions more salient. Moreover, SIM adds geometrical grouplets to enhance complex low-level features such as corners, and suppress relatively simpler features such as edges. Since our model has been fitted on psychophysical chromatic induction data, it is largely nonparametric. SIM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in predicting eye fixations on two datasets and using two metrics.
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Javier Vazquez, J. Kevin O'Regan, Maria Vanrell, & Graham D. Finlayson. (2012). A new spectrally sharpened basis to predict colour naming, unique hues, and hue cancellation. VSS - Journal of Vision, 12(6 (7)), 1–14.
Abstract: When light is reflected off a surface, there is a linear relation between the three human photoreceptor responses to the incoming light and the three photoreceptor responses to the reflected light. Different colored surfaces have different linear relations. Recently, Philipona and O'Regan (2006) showed that when this relation is singular in a mathematical sense, then the surface is perceived as having a highly nameable color. Furthermore, white light reflected by that surface is perceived as corresponding precisely to one of the four psychophysically measured unique hues. However, Philipona and O'Regan's approach seems unrelated to classical psychophysical models of color constancy. In this paper we make this link. We begin by transforming cone sensors to spectrally sharpened counterparts. In sharp color space, illumination change can be modeled by simple von Kries type scalings of response values within each of the spectrally sharpened response channels. In this space, Philipona and O'Regan's linear relation is captured by a simple Land-type color designator defined by dividing reflected light by incident light. This link between Philipona and O'Regan's theory and Land's notion of color designator gives the model biological plausibility. We then show that Philipona and O'Regan's singular surfaces are surfaces which are very close to activating only one or only two of such newly defined spectrally sharpened sensors, instead of the usual three. Closeness to zero is quantified in a new simplified measure of singularity which is also shown to relate to the chromaticness of colors. As in Philipona and O'Regan's original work, our new theory accounts for a large variety of psychophysical color data.
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Naila Murray, Luca Marchesotti, & Florent Perronnin. (2012). AVA: A Large-Scale Database for Aesthetic Visual Analysis. In 25th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 2408–2415). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: With the ever-expanding volume of visual content available, the ability to organize and navigate such content by aesthetic preference is becoming increasingly important. While still in its nascent stage, research into computational models of aesthetic preference already shows great potential. However, to advance research, realistic, diverse and challenging databases are needed. To this end, we introduce a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis: AVA. It contains over 250,000 images along with a rich variety of meta-data including a large number of aesthetic scores for each image, semantic labels for over 60 categories as well as labels related to photographic style. We show the advantages of AVA with respect to existing databases in terms of scale, diversity, and heterogeneity of annotations. We then describe several key insights into aesthetic preference afforded by AVA. Finally, we demonstrate, through three applications, how the large scale of AVA can be leveraged to improve performance on existing preference tasks
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