Eduard Vazquez, Theo Gevers, M. Lucassen, Joost Van de Weijer, & Ramon Baldrich. (2010). Saliency of Color Image Derivatives: A Comparison between Computational Models and Human Perception. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 27(3), 613–621.
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%.
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Graham D. Finlayson, Javier Vazquez, Sabine Süsstrunk, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Spectral sharpening by spherical sampling. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 29(7), 1199–1210.
Abstract: There are many works in color that assume illumination change can be modeled by multiplying sensor responses by individual scaling factors. The early research in this area is sometimes grouped under the heading “von Kries adaptation”: the scaling factors are applied to the cone responses. In more recent studies, both in psychophysics and in computational analysis, it has been proposed that scaling factors should be applied to linear combinations of the cones that have narrower support: they should be applied to the so-called “sharp sensors.” In this paper, we generalize the computational approach to spectral sharpening in three important ways. First, we introduce spherical sampling as a tool that allows us to enumerate in a principled way all linear combinations of the cones. This allows us to, second, find the optimal sharp sensors that minimize a variety of error measures including CIE Delta E (previous work on spectral sharpening minimized RMS) and color ratio stability. Lastly, we extend the spherical sampling paradigm to the multispectral case. Here the objective is to model the interaction of light and surface in terms of color signal spectra. Spherical sampling is shown to improve on the state of the art.
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Hassan Ahmed Sial, Ramon Baldrich, & Maria Vanrell. (2020). Deep intrinsic decomposition trained on surreal scenes yet with realistic light effects. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 37(1), 1–15.
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.
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Ivet Rafegas, Javier Vazquez, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Susana Alvarez. (2017). Enhancing spatio-chromatic representation with more-than-three color coding for image description. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 34(5), 827–837.
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.
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Rada Deeb, Joost Van de Weijer, Damien Muselet, Mathieu Hebert, & Alain Tremeau. (2019). Deep spectral reflectance and illuminant estimation from self-interreflections. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 31(1), 105–114.
Abstract: In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network based approach to estimate the spectral reflectance of a surface and spectral power distribution of light from a single RGB image of a V-shaped surface. Interreflections happening in a concave surface lead to gradients of RGB values over its area. These gradients carry a lot of information concerning the physical properties of the surface and the illuminant. Our network is trained with only simulated data constructed using a physics-based interreflection model. Coupling interreflection effects with deep learning helps to retrieve the spectral reflectance under an unknown light and to estimate spectral power distribution of this light as well. In addition, it is more robust to the presence of image noise than classical approaches. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based approaches on simulated data. In addition, it gives better results on real data compared to other interreflection-based approaches.
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Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Ramon Baldrich. (2008). Parametric Fuzzy Sets for Automatic Color Naming. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 2582–2593.
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Sophie Wuerger, Kaida Xiao, Dimitris Mylonas, Q. Huang, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Galina Paramei. (2012). Blue green color categorization in mandarin english speakers. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 29(2), A102–A1207.
Abstract: Observers are faster to detect a target among a set of distracters if the targets and distracters come from different color categories. This cross-boundary advantage seems to be limited to the right visual field, which is consistent with the dominance of the left hemisphere for language processing [Gilbert et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 489 (2006)]. Here we study whether a similar visual field advantage is found in the color identification task in speakers of Mandarin, a language that uses a logographic system. Forty late Mandarin-English bilinguals performed a blue-green color categorization task, in a blocked design, in their first language (L1: Mandarin) or second language (L2: English). Eleven color singletons ranging from blue to green were presented for 160 ms, randomly in the left visual field (LVF) or right visual field (RVF). Color boundary and reaction times (RTs) at the color boundary were estimated in L1 and L2, for both visual fields. We found that the color boundary did not differ between the languages; RTs at the color boundary, however, were on average more than 100 ms shorter in the English compared to the Mandarin sessions, but only when the stimuli were presented in the RVF. The finding may be explained by the script nature of the two languages: Mandarin logographic characters are analyzed visuospatially in the right hemisphere, which conceivably facilitates identification of color presented to the LVF.
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Xim Cerda-Company, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Xavier Otazu. (2018). Which tone-mapping operator is the best? A comparative study of perceptual quality. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 35(4), 626–638.
Abstract: Tone-mapping operators (TMO) are designed to generate perceptually similar low-dynamic range images from high-dynamic range ones. We studied the performance of fifteen TMOs in two psychophysical experiments where observers compared the digitally-generated tone-mapped images to their corresponding physical scenes. All experiments were performed in a controlled environment and the setups were
designed to emphasize different image properties: in the first experiment we evaluated the local relationships among intensity-levels, and in the second one we evaluated global visual appearance among physical scenes and tone-mapped images, which were presented side by side. We ranked the TMOs according
to how well they reproduced the results obtained in the physical scene. Our results show that ranking position clearly depends on the adopted evaluation criteria, which implies that, in general, these tone-mapping algorithms consider either local or global image attributes but rarely both. Regarding the
question of which TMO is the best, KimKautz [1] and Krawczyk [2] obtained the better results across the different experiments. We conclude that a more thorough and standardized evaluation criteria is needed to study all the characteristics of TMOs, as there is ample room for improvement in future developments.
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Xim Cerda-Company, & Xavier Otazu. (2019). Color induction in equiluminant flashed stimuli. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 36(1), 22–31.
Abstract: Color induction is the influence of the surrounding color (inducer) on the perceived color of a central region. There are two different types of color induction: color contrast (the color of the central region shifts away from that of the inducer) and color assimilation (the color shifts towards the color of the inducer). Several studies on these effects have used uniform and striped surrounds, reporting color contrast and color assimilation, respectively. Other authors [J. Vis. 12(1), 22 (2012) [CrossRef] ] have studied color induction using flashed uniform surrounds, reporting that the contrast is higher for shorter flash duration. Extending their study, we present new psychophysical results using both flashed and static (i.e., non-flashed) equiluminant stimuli for both striped and uniform surrounds. Similarly to them, for uniform surround stimuli we observed color contrast, but we did not obtain the maximum contrast for the shortest (10 ms) flashed stimuli, but for 40 ms. We only observed this maximum contrast for red, green, and lime inducers, while for a purple inducer we obtained an asymptotic profile along the flash duration. For striped stimuli, we observed color assimilation only for the static (infinite flash duration) red–green surround inducers (red first inducer, green second inducer). For the other inducers’ configurations, we observed color contrast or no induction. Since other studies showed that non-equiluminant striped static stimuli induce color assimilation, our results also suggest that luminance differences could be a key factor to induce it.
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