Abstract: State-of-the-art texture descriptors typically operate on grey scale images while ignoring color information. A common way to obtain a joint color-texture representation is to combine the two visual cues at the pixel level. However, such an approach provides sub-optimal results for texture categorisation task.
In this paper we investigate how to optimally exploit color information for texture recognition. We evaluate a variety of color descriptors, popular in image classification, for texture categorisation. In addition we analyze different fusion approaches to combine color and texture cues. Experiments are conducted on the challenging scenes and 10 class texture datasets. Our experiments clearly suggest that in all cases color names provide the best performance. Late fusion is the best strategy to combine color and texture. By selecting the best color descriptor with optimal fusion strategy provides a gain of 5% to 8% compared to texture alone on scenes and texture datasets.

Abstract: Historical documents suffer from different types of degradation and noise such as background variation, uneven illumination or dark spots. In case of double-sided documents, another common problem is that the back side of the document usually interferes with the front side because of the transparency of the document or ink bleeding. This effect is called the show through phenomenon. Many methods are developed to solve these problems, and in the case of show-through, by scanning and matching both the front and back sides of the document. In contrast, our approach is designed to use only one side of the scanned document. We hypothesize that show-trough are low contrast components, while foreground components are high contrast ones. A Multiresolution Contrast (MC) decomposition is presented in order to estimate the contrast of features at different spatial scales. We cancel the show-through phenomenon by thresholding these low contrast components. This decomposition is also able to enhance the image removing shadowed areas by weighting spatial scales. Results show that the enhanced images improve the readability of the documents, allowing scholars both to recover unreadable words and to solve ambiguities.

Abstract: Recent advances in camera designs and imaging pipelines allow us to capture high-quality images using smartphones. However, due to the small size and lens limitations of the smartphone cameras, we commonly find artifacts or degradation in the processed images. The most common unpleasant effects are noise artifacts, diffraction artifacts, blur, and HDR overexposure. Deep learning methods for image restoration can successfully remove these artifacts. However, most approaches are not suitable for real-time applications on mobile devices due to their heavy computation and memory requirements. In this paper, we propose LPIENet, a lightweight network for perceptual image enhancement, with the focus on deploying it on smartphones. Our experiments show that, with much fewer parameters and operations, our model can deal with the mentioned artifacts and achieve competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks. Moreover, to prove the efficiency and reliability of our approach, we deployed the model directly on commercial smartphones and evaluated its performance. Our model can process 2K resolution images under 1 second in mid-level commercial smartphones.

Abstract: Automatic document content processing is affected by artifacts caused by the shape
of the paper, non-uniform and diverse color of lighting conditions. Fully-supervised
methods on real data are impossible due to the large amount of data needed. Hence, the
current state of the art deep learning models are trained on fully or partially synthetic images. However, document shadow or shading removal results still suffer because: (a) prior methods rely on uniformity of local color statistics, which limit their application on real-scenarios with complex document shapes and textures and; (b) synthetic or hybrid datasets with non-realistic, simulated lighting conditions are used to train the models. In this paper we tackle these problems with our two main contributions. First, a physically constrained learning-based method that directly estimates document reflectance based on intrinsic image formation which generalizes to challenging illumination conditions. Second, a new dataset that clearly improves previous synthetic ones, by adding a large range of realistic shading and diverse multi-illuminant conditions, uniquely customized to deal with documents in-the-wild. The proposed architecture works in two steps. First, a white balancing module neutralizes the color of the illumination on the input image. Based on the proposed multi-illuminant dataset we achieve a good white-balancing in really difficult conditions. Second, the shading separation module accurately disentangles the shading and paper material in a self-supervised manner where only the synthetic texture is used as a weak training signal (obviating the need for very costly ground truth with disentangled versions of shading and reflectance). The proposed approach leads to significant generalization of document reflectance estimation in real scenes with challenging illumination. We extensively evaluate on the real benchmark datasets available for intrinsic image decomposition and document shadow removal tasks. Our reflectance estimation scheme, when used as a pre-processing step of an OCR pipeline, shows a 21% improvement of character error rate (CER), thus, proving the practical applicability. The data and code will be available at: https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/DocIIW.

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for object recognition tasks present representational capabilities approaching to primate visual systems [1]. This provides a computational framework to explore how image features
are efficiently represented. Here, we dissect a trained CNN
[2] to study how color is represented. We use a classical methodology used in physiology that is measuring index of selectivity of individual neurons to specific features. We use ImageNet Dataset [20] images and synthetic versions
of them to quantify color tuning properties of artificial neurons to provide a classification of the network population.
We conclude three main levels of color representation showing some parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a decomposition in a circular hue space to represent single color regions with a wider hue sampling beyond the first
layer (V2), (b) the emergence of opponent low-dimensional spaces in early stages to represent color edges (V1); and (c) a strong entanglement between color and shape patterns representing object-parts (e.g. wheel of a car), objectshapes (e.g. faces) or object-surrounds configurations (e.g. blue sky surrounding an object) in deeper layers (V4 or IT).

Abstract: This paper reviews the NTIRE 2023 challenge on image denoising (σ = 50) with a focus on the proposed solutions and results. The aim is to obtain a network design capable to produce high-quality results with the best performance measured by PSNR for image denoising. Independent additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is assumed and the noise level is 50. The challenge had 225 registered participants, and 16 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art for image denoising.

Abstract: Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging problem that consists in separating an image into its physical characteristics: reflectance and shading. This problem can be solved in different ways, but most methods have combined information from several visual cues. In this work we describe an extension of an existing method proposed by Serra et al. which considers two color descriptors and combines them by means of a Markov Random Field. We analyze in depth the weak points of the method and we explore more possibilities to use in both descriptors. The proposed extension depends on the combination of the cues considered to overcome some of the limitations of the original method. Our approach is tested on the MIT dataset and Beigpour et al. dataset, which contain images of real objects acquired under controlled conditions and synthetic images respectively, with their corresponding ground truth.

Abstract: Recognizing human actions in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision due to significant amount of scale, illumination and pose variation. Given the bounding box of a person both at training and test time, the task is to classify the action associated with each bounding box in an image.
Most state-of-the-art methods use the bag-of-words paradigm for action recognition. The bag-of-words framework employing a dense multi-scale grid sampling strategy is the de facto standard for feature detection. This results in a scale invariant image representation where all the features at multiple-scales are binned in a single histogram. We argue that such a scale invariant
strategy is sub-optimal since it ignores the multi-scale information
available with each bounding box of a person.
This paper investigates alternative approaches to scale coding for action recognition in still images. We encode multi-scale information explicitly in three different histograms for small, medium and large scale visual-words. Our first approach exploits multi-scale information with respect to the image size. In our second approach, we encode multi-scale information relative to the size of the bounding box of a person instance. In each approach, the multi-scale histograms are then concatenated into a single representation for action classification. We validate our approaches on the Willow dataset which contains seven action categories: interacting with computer, photography, playing music,
riding bike, riding horse, running and walking. Our results clearly suggest that the proposed scale coding approaches outperform the conventional scale invariant technique. Moreover, we show that our approach obtains promising results compared to more complex state-of-the-art methods.