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: Colour constancy is a perceptual mechanism that seeks to keep the colour of objects relatively stable under an illumination shift. Experiments haveshown that its effects depend on the number of colours present in the scene. We
studied categorical colour changes under different adaptation states, in particular, whether the colour categories seen under a chromatically neutral illuminant are the same after a shift in the chromaticity of the illumination. To do this, we developed the chromatic setting paradigm (2011 Journal of Vision11 349), which is as an extension of achromatic setting to colour categories. The paradigm exploits the ability of subjects to reliably reproduce the most representative examples of each category, adjusting multiple test patches embedded in a coloured Mondrian. Our experiments were run on a CRT monitor (inside a dark room) under various simulated illuminants and restricting the number of colours of the Mondrian background to three, thus weakening the adaptation effect. Our results show a change in the colour categories present before (under neutral illumination) and after adaptation (under coloured illuminants) with a tendency for adapted colours to be less saturated than before adaptation. This behaviour was predicted by a simple
affine matrix model, adjusted to the chromatic setting results.

Abstract: Projector-camera systems are designed to improve the projection quality by comparing original images with their captured projections, which is usually complicated due to high photometric and geometric variations. Many research works address this problem using their own test data which makes it extremely difficult to compare different proposals. This paper has two main contributions. Firstly, we introduce a new database of acquired image projections (DAcImPro) that, covering photometric and geometric conditions and providing data for ground-truth computation, can serve to evaluate different algorithms in projector-camera systems. Secondly, a new object recognition scenario from acquired projections is presented, which could be of a great interest in such domains, as home video projections and public presentations. We show that the task is more challenging than the classical recognition problem and thus requires additional pre-processing, such as color compensation or projection area selection.

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks have been proposed as suitable frameworks to model biological vision. Some of these artificial networks showed representational properties that rival primate performances in object recognition. In this paper we explore how color is encoded in a trained artificial network. It is performed by estimating a color selectivity index for each neuron, which allows us to describe the neuron activity to a color input stimuli. The index allows us to classify whether they are color selective or not and if they are of a single or double color. We have determined that all five convolutional layers of the network have a large number of color selective neurons. Color opponency clearly emerges in the first layer, presenting 4 main axes (Black-White, Red-Cyan, Blue-Yellow and Magenta-Green), but this is reduced and rotated as we go deeper into the network. In layer 2 we find a denser hue sampling of color neurons and opponency is reduced almost to one new main axis, the Bluish-Orangish coinciding with the dataset bias. In layers 3, 4 and 5 color neurons are similar amongst themselves, presenting different type of neurons that detect specific colored objects (e.g., orangish faces), specific surrounds (e.g., blue sky) or specific colored or contrasted object-surround configurations (e.g. blue blob in a green surround). Overall, our work concludes that color and shape representation are successively entangled through all the layers of the studied network, revealing certain parallelisms with the reported evidences in primate brains that can provide useful insight into intermediate hierarchical spatio-chromatic representations.

Abstract: Estimation of intrinsic images still remains a challenging task due to weaknesses of ground-truth datasets, which either are too small or present non-realistic issues. On the other hand, end-to-end deep learning architectures start to achieve interesting results that we believe could be improved if important physical hints were not ignored. In this work, we present a twofold framework: (a) a flexible generation of images overcoming some classical dataset problems such as larger size jointly with coherent lighting appearance; and (b) a flexible architecture tying physical properties through intrinsic losses. Our proposal is versatile, presents low computation time, and achieves state-of-the-art results.