Olivier Penacchio, Xavier Otazu, & Laura Dempere-Marco. (2013). A Neurodynamical Model of Brightness Induction in V1. Plos - PloS ONE, 8(5), e64086.
Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an area by the luminance of surrounding areas. Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that brightness information might be explicitly represented in V1, in contrast to the more common assumption that the striate cortex is an area mostly responsive to sensory information. Here we investigate possible neural mechanisms that offer a plausible explanation for such phenomenon. To this end, a neurodynamical model which is based on neurophysiological evidence and focuses on the part of V1 responsible for contextual influences is presented. The proposed computational model successfully accounts for well known psychophysical effects for static contexts and also for brightness induction in dynamic contexts defined by modulating the luminance of surrounding areas. This work suggests that intra-cortical interactions in V1 could, at least partially, explain brightness induction effects and reveals how a common general architecture may account for several different fundamental processes, such as visual saliency and brightness induction, which emerge early in the visual processing pathway.
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Ramon Baldrich. (2009). Psychophysical measurements to model inter-colour regions of colour-naming space. Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 53(3), 031106 (8 pages).
Abstract: JCR Impact Factor 2009: 0.391
In this paper, we present a fuzzy-set of parametric functions which segment the CIE lab space into eleven regions which correspond to the group of common universal categories present in all evolved languages as identified by anthropologists and linguists. The set of functions is intended to model a color-name assignment task by humans and differs from other models in its emphasis on the inter-color boundary regions, which were explicitly measured by means of a psychophysics experiment. In our particular implementation, the CIE lab space was segmented into eleven color categories using a Triple Sigmoid as the fuzzy sets basis, whose parameters are included in this paper. The model’s parameters were adjusted according to the psychophysical results of a yes/no discrimination paradigm where observers had to choose (English) names for isoluminant colors belonging to regions in-between neighboring categories. These colors were presented on a calibrated CRT monitor (14-bit x 3 precision). The experimental results show that inter- color boundary regions are much less defined than expected and color samples other than those near the most representatives are needed to define the position and shape of boundaries between categories. The extended set of model parameters is given as a table.
Keywords: image processing; Analysis
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Javier Vazquez, C. Alejandro Parraga, Maria Vanrell, & Ramon Baldrich. (2009). Color Constancy Algorithms: Psychophysical Evaluation on a New Dataset. Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 53(3), 031105–9.
Abstract: The estimation of the illuminant of a scene from a digital image has been the goal of a large amount of research in computer vision. Color constancy algorithms have dealt with this problem by defining different heuristics to select a unique solution from within the feasible set. The performance of these algorithms has shown that there is still a long way to go to globally solve this problem as a preliminary step in computer vision. In general, performance evaluation has been done by comparing the angular error between the estimated chromaticity and the chromaticity of a canonical illuminant, which is highly dependent on the image dataset. Recently, some workers have used high-level constraints to estimate illuminants; in this case selection is based on increasing the performance on the subsequent steps of the systems. In this paper we propose a new performance measure, the perceptual angular error. It evaluates the performance of a color constancy algorithm according to the perceptual preferences of humans, or naturalness (instead of the actual optimal solution) and is independent of the visual task. We show the results of a new psychophysical experiment comparing solutions from three different color constancy algorithms. Our results show that in more than a half of the judgments the preferred solution is not the one closest to the optimal solution. Our experiments were performed on a new dataset of images acquired with a calibrated camera with an attached neutral grey sphere, which better copes with the illuminant variations of the scene.
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Bojana Gajic, & Ramon Baldrich. (2018). Cross-domain fashion image retrieval. In CVPR 2018 Workshop on Women in Computer Vision (WiCV 2018, 4th Edition) (pp. 19500–19502).
Abstract: Cross domain image retrieval is a challenging task that implies matching images from one domain to their pairs from another domain. In this paper we focus on fashion image retrieval, which involves matching an image of a fashion item taken by users, to the images of the same item taken in controlled condition, usually by professional photographer. When facing this problem, we have different products
in train and test time, and we use triplet loss to train the network. We stress the importance of proper training of simple architecture, as well as adapting general models to the specific task.
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Domicele Jonauskaite, Lucia Camenzind, C. Alejandro Parraga, Cecile N Diouf, Mathieu Mercapide Ducommun, Lauriane Müller, et al. (2021). Colour-emotion associations in individuals with red-green colour blindness. PeerJ, 9, e11180.
Abstract: Colours and emotions are associated in languages and traditions. Some of us may convey sadness by saying feeling blue or by wearing black clothes at funerals. The first example is a conceptual experience of colour and the second example is an immediate perceptual experience of colour. To investigate whether one or the other type of experience more strongly drives colour-emotion associations, we tested 64 congenitally red-green colour-blind men and 66 non-colour-blind men. All participants associated 12 colours, presented as terms or patches, with 20 emotion concepts, and rated intensities of the associated emotions. We found that colour-blind and non-colour-blind men associated similar emotions with colours, irrespective of whether colours were conveyed via terms (r = .82) or patches (r = .80). The colour-emotion associations and the emotion intensities were not modulated by participants' severity of colour blindness. Hinting at some additional, although minor, role of actual colour perception, the consistencies in associations for colour terms and patches were higher in non-colour-blind than colour-blind men. Together, these results suggest that colour-emotion associations in adults do not require immediate perceptual colour experiences, as conceptual experiences are sufficient.
Keywords: Affect; Chromotherapy; Colour cognition; Colour vision deficiency; Cross-modal correspondences; Daltonism; Deuteranopia; Dichromatic; Emotion; Protanopia.
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Jaykishan Patel, Alban Flachot, Javier Vazquez, David H. Brainard, Thomas S. A. Wallis, Marcus A. Brubaker, et al. (2023). A deep convolutional neural network trained to infer surface reflectance is deceived by mid-level lightness illusions. JV - Journal of Vision, 23(9), 4817.
Abstract: A long-standing view is that lightness illusions are by-products of strategies employed by the visual system to stabilize its perceptual representation of surface reflectance against changes in illumination. Computationally, one such strategy is to infer reflectance from the retinal image, and to base the lightness percept on this inference. CNNs trained to infer reflectance from images have proven successful at solving this problem under limited conditions. To evaluate whether these CNNs provide suitable starting points for computational models of human lightness perception, we tested a state-of-the-art CNN on several lightness illusions, and compared its behaviour to prior measurements of human performance. We trained a CNN (Yu & Smith, 2019) to infer reflectance from luminance images. The network had a 30-layer hourglass architecture with skip connections. We trained the network via supervised learning on 100K images, rendered in Blender, each showing randomly placed geometric objects (surfaces, cubes, tori, etc.), with random Lambertian reflectance patterns (solid, Voronoi, or low-pass noise), under randomized point+ambient lighting. The renderer also provided the ground-truth reflectance images required for training. After training, we applied the network to several visual illusions. These included the argyle, Koffka-Adelson, snake, White’s, checkerboard assimilation, and simultaneous contrast illusions, along with their controls where appropriate. The CNN correctly predicted larger illusions in the argyle, Koffka-Adelson, and snake images than in their controls. It also correctly predicted an assimilation effect in White's illusion. It did not, however, account for the checkerboard assimilation or simultaneous contrast effects. These results are consistent with the view that at least some lightness phenomena are by-products of a rational approach to inferring stable representations of physical properties from intrinsically ambiguous retinal images. Furthermore, they suggest that CNN models may be a promising starting point for new models of human lightness perception.
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Susana Alvarez, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Texton theory revisited: a bag-of-words approach to combine textons. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(12), 4312–4325.
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.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Michael Felsberg, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Semantic Pyramids for Gender and Action Recognition. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(8), 3633–3645.
Abstract: Person description is a challenging problem in computer vision. We investigated two major aspects of person description: 1) gender and 2) action recognition in still images. Most state-of-the-art approaches for gender and action recognition rely on the description of a single body part, such as face or full-body. However, relying on a single body part is suboptimal due to significant variations in scale, viewpoint, and pose in real-world images. This paper proposes a semantic pyramid approach for pose normalization. Our approach is fully automatic and based on combining information from full-body, upper-body, and face regions for gender and action recognition in still images. The proposed approach does not require any annotations for upper-body and face of a person. Instead, we rely on pretrained state-of-the-art upper-body and face detectors to automatically extract semantic information of a person. Given multiple bounding boxes from each body part detector, we then propose a simple method to select the best candidate bounding box, which is used for feature extraction. Finally, the extracted features from the full-body, upper-body, and face regions are combined into a single representation for classification. To validate the proposed approach for gender recognition, experiments are performed on three large data sets namely: 1) human attribute; 2) head-shoulder; and 3) proxemics. For action recognition, we perform experiments on four data sets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: 1) Sports; 2) Willow; 3) PASCAL VOC 2010; and 4) Stanford-40. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for gender and action recognition.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Maria Vanrell, & Antonio Lopez. (2012). Color Attributes for Object Detection. In 25th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 3306–3313). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: State-of-the-art object detectors typically use shape information as a low level feature representation to capture the local structure of an object. This paper shows that early fusion of shape and color, as is popular in image classification,
leads to a significant drop in performance for object detection. Moreover, such approaches also yields suboptimal results for object categories with varying importance of color and shape.
In this paper we propose the use of color attributes as an explicit color representation for object detection. Color attributes are compact, computationally efficient, and when combined with traditional shape features provide state-ofthe-
art results for object detection. Our method is tested on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 datasets and results clearly show that our method improves over state-of-the-art techniques despite its simplicity. We also introduce a new dataset consisting of cartoon character images in which color plays a pivotal role. On this dataset, our approach yields a significant gain of 14% in mean AP over conventional state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords: pedestrian detection
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Josep M. Gonfaus, Xavier Boix, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Joan Serrat, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2010). Harmony Potentials for Joint Classification and Segmentation. In 23rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (3280–3287).
Abstract: Hierarchical conditional random fields have been successfully applied to object segmentation. One reason is their ability to incorporate contextual information at different scales. However, these models do not allow multiple labels to be assigned to a single node. At higher scales in the image, this yields an oversimplified model, since multiple classes can be reasonable expected to appear within one region. This simplified model especially limits the impact that observations at larger scales may have on the CRF model. Neglecting the information at larger scales is undesirable since class-label estimates based on these scales are more reliable than at smaller, noisier scales. To address this problem, we propose a new potential, called harmony potential, which can encode any possible combination of class labels. We propose an effective sampling strategy that renders tractable the underlying optimization problem. Results show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on two challenging datasets: Pascal VOC 2009 and MSRC-21.
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Rahat Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Damien Muselet, christophe Ducottet, & Cecile Barat. (2013). Discriminative Color Descriptors. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 2866–2873).
Abstract: Color description is a challenging task because of large variations in RGB values which occur due to scene accidental events, such as shadows, shading, specularities, illuminant color changes, and changes in viewing geometry. Traditionally, this challenge has been addressed by capturing the variations in physics-based models, and deriving invariants for the undesired variations. The drawback of this approach is that sets of distinguishable colors in the original color space are mapped to the same value in the photometric invariant space. This results in a drop of discriminative power of the color description. In this paper we take an information theoretic approach to color description. We cluster color values together based on their discriminative power in a classification problem. The clustering has the explicit objective to minimize the drop of mutual information of the final representation. We show that such a color description automatically learns a certain degree of photometric invariance. We also show that a universal color representation, which is based on other data sets than the one at hand, can obtain competing performance. Experiments show that the proposed descriptor outperforms existing photometric invariants. Furthermore, we show that combined with shape description these color descriptors obtain excellent results on four challenging datasets, namely, PASCAL VOC 2007, Flowers-102, Stanford dogs-120 and Birds-200.
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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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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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Arjan Gijsenij, Theo Gevers, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2011). Computational Color Constancy: Survey and Experiments. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(9), 2475–2489.
Abstract: Computational color constancy is a fundamental prerequisite for many computer vision applications. This paper presents a survey of many recent developments and state-of-the- art methods. Several criteria are proposed that are used to assess the approaches. A taxonomy of existing algorithms is proposed and methods are separated in three groups: static methods, gamut-based methods and learning-based methods. Further, the experimental setup is discussed including an overview of publicly available data sets. Finally, various freely available methods, of which some are considered to be state-of-the-art, are evaluated on two data sets.
Keywords: computational color constancy;computer vision application;gamut-based method;learning-based method;static method;colour vision;computer vision;image colour analysis;learning (artificial intelligence);lighting
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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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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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Javier Vazquez, Maria Vanrell, Ramon Baldrich, & Francesc Tous. (2012). Color Constancy by Category Correlation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(4), 1997–2007.
Abstract: Finding color representations which are stable to illuminant changes is still an open problem in computer vision. Until now most approaches have been based on physical constraints or statistical assumptions derived from the scene, while very little attention has been paid to the effects that selected illuminants have
on the final color image representation. The novelty of this work is to propose
perceptual constraints that are computed on the corrected images. We define the
category hypothesis, which weights the set of feasible illuminants according to their ability to map the corrected image onto specific colors. Here we choose these colors as the universal color categories related to basic linguistic terms which have been psychophysically measured. These color categories encode natural color statistics, and their relevance across different cultures is indicated by the fact that they have received a common color name. From this category hypothesis we propose a fast implementation that allows the sampling of a large set of illuminants. Experiments prove that our method rivals current state-of-art performance without the need for training algorithmic parameters. Additionally, the method can be used as a framework to insert top-down information from other sources, thus opening further research directions in solving for color constancy.
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Yawei Li, Yulun Zhang, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool, Zhijun Tu, Kunpeng Du, et al. (2023). NTIRE 2023 challenge on image denoising: Methods and results. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 1904–1920).
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.
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