Abstract: Medial representations are a widely used technique in abdominal organ shape representation and parametrization. Those methods require good medial manifolds as a starting point. Any medial
surface used to parametrize a volume should be simple enough to allow an easy manipulation and complete enough to allow an accurate reconstruction of the volume. Obtaining good quality medial
surfaces is still a problem with current iterative thinning methods. This forces the usage of generic, pre-calculated medial templates that are adapted to the final shape at the cost of a drop in volume reconstruction.
This paper describes an operator for generation of medial structures that generates clean and complete manifolds well suited for their further use in medial representations of abdominal organ volumes. While being simpler than thinning surfaces, experiments show its high performance in volume reconstruction and preservation of medial surface main branching topology.

Abstract: In Part 1 of the thesis, we hypothesize that salient and non-salient image regions can be estimated to be the regions which are enhanced or assimilated in standard low-level color image representations. We prove this hypothesis by adapting a low-level model of color perception into a saliency estimation model. This model shares the three main steps found in many successful models for predicting attention in a scene: convolution with a set of filters, a center-surround mechanism and spatial pooling to construct a saliency map. For such models, integrating spatial information and justifying the choice of various parameter values remain open problems. Our saliency model inherits a principled selection of parameters as well as an innate spatial pooling mechanism from the perception model on which it is based. This pooling mechanism has been fitted using psychophysical data acquired in color-luminance setting experiments. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art at the task of predicting eye-fixations from two datasets. After demonstrating the effectiveness of our basic saliency model, we introduce an improved image representation, based on geometrical grouplets, that enhances complex low-level visual features such as corners and terminations, and suppresses relatively simpler features such as edges. With this improved image representation, the performance of our saliency model in predicting eye-fixations increases for both datasets.
In Part 2 of the thesis, we investigate the problem of aesthetic visual analysis. While a great deal of research has been conducted on hand-crafting image descriptors for aesthetics, little attention so far has been dedicated to the collection, annotation and distribution of ground truth data. Because image aesthetics is complex and subjective, existing datasets, which have few images and few annotations, have significant limitations. To address these limitations, we have introduced a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis, which we call AVA. AVA contains more than 250,000 images, along with a rich variety of annotations. We investigate how the wealth of data in AVA can be used to tackle the challenge of understanding and assessing visual aesthetics by looking into several problems relevant for aesthetic analysis. We demonstrate that by leveraging the data in AVA, and using generic low-level features such as SIFT and color histograms, we can exceed state-of-the-art performance in aesthetic quality prediction tasks.
Finally, we entertain the hypothesis that low-level visual information in our saliency model can also be used to predict visual aesthetics by capturing local image characteristics such as feature contrast, grouping and isolation, characteristics thought to be related to universal aesthetic laws. We use the weighted center-surround responses that form the basis of our saliency model to create a feature vector that describes aesthetics. We also introduce a novel color space for fine-grained color representation. We then demonstrate that the resultant features achieve state-of-the-art performance on aesthetic quality classification.
As such, a promising contribution of this thesis is to show that several vision experiences – low-level color perception, visual saliency and visual aesthetics estimation – may be successfully modeled using a unified framework. This suggests a similar architecture in area V1 for both color perception and saliency and adds evidence to the hypothesis that visual aesthetics appreciation is driven in part by low-level cues.

Abstract: This thesis is devoted to moving shadows detection and suppression. Shadows could be defined as the parts of the scene that are not directly illuminated by a light source due to obstructing object or objects. Often, moving shadows in images sequences are undesirable since they could cause degradation of the expected results during processing of images for object detection, segmentation, scene surveillance or similar purposes. In this thesis first moving shadow detection methods are exhaustively overviewed. Beside the mentioned methods from literature and to compensate their limitations a new moving shadow detection method is proposed. It requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to assumptions about specific scene structures. Furthermore, the technique can detect both achromatic and chromatic shadows even in the presence of camouflage that occurs when foreground regions are very similar in color to shadowed regions. The method exploits local color constancy properties due to reflectance suppression over shadowed regions. To detect shadowed regions in a scene the values of the background image are divided by values of the current frame in the RGB color space. In the thesis how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy is shown, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared with the most sophisticated state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that the proposed approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.

Abstract: To recognise objects is perhaps the most important task an autonomous system, either biological or artificial needs to perform. In the context of human vision, this is partly achieved by recognizing the colour of surfaces despite changes in the wavelength distribution of the illumination, a property called colour constancy. Correct surface colour recognition may be adequately accomplished by colour category matching without the need to match colours precisely, therefore categorical colour constancy is likely to play an important role for object identification to be successful. The main aim of this work is to study the relationship between colour constancy and categorical colour perception. Previous studies of colour constancy have shown the influence of factors such the spatio-chromatic properties of the background, individual observer's performance, semantics, etc. However there is very little systematic study of these influences. To this end, we developed a new approach to colour constancy which includes both individual observers' categorical perception, the categorical structure of the background, and their interrelations resulting in a more comprehensive characterization of the phenomenon. In our study, we first developed a new method to analyse the categorical structure of 3D colour space, which allowed us to characterize individual categorical colour perception as well as quantify inter-individual variations in terms of shape and centroid location of 3D categorical regions. Second, we developed a new colour constancy paradigm, termed chromatic setting, which allows measuring the precise location of nine categorically-relevant points in colour space under immersive illumination. Additionally, we derived from these measurements a new colour constancy index which takes into account the magnitude and orientation of the chromatic shift, memory effects and the interrelations among colours and a model of colour naming tuned to each observer/adaptation state. Our results lead to the following conclusions: (1) There exists large inter-individual variations in the categorical structure of colour space, and thus colour naming ability varies significantly but this is not well predicted by low-level chromatic discrimination ability; (2) Analysis of the average colour naming space suggested the need for an additional three basic colour terms (turquoise, lilac and lime) for optimal colour communication; (3) Chromatic setting improved the precision of more complex linear colour constancy models and suggested that mechanisms other than cone gain might be best suited to explain colour constancy; (4) The categorical structure of colour space is broadly stable under illuminant changes for categorically balanced backgrounds; (5) Categorical inconstancy exists for categorically unbalanced backgrounds thus indicating that categorical information perceived in the initial stages of adaptation may constrain further categorical perception.

Abstract: The ability to automatically detect and recognize objects in unconstrained images is becoming more and more critical: from security systems and autonomous robots, to smart phones and augmented reality, intelligent devices need to understand the meaning of images as a composition of semantic objects. This Thesis tackles the problem of fast object detection based on template models. Detection consists of searching for an object in an image by evaluating the similarity between a template model and an image region at each possible location and scale. In this work, we show that using a template model representation based on a multiple resolution hierarchy is an optimal choice that can lead to excellent detection accuracy and fast computation. We implement two different approaches that make use of a hierarchy of multiresolution models: a multiresolution cascade and a coarse-to-fine search. Also, we extend the coarse-to-fine search by introducing a deformable part-based model that achieves state-of-the-art results together with a very reduced computational cost. Finally, we specialize our approach to the challenging task of pedestrian detection from moving vehicles and show that the overall quality of the system outperforms previous works in terms of speed and accuracy.