Naila Murray, Sandra Skaff, Luca Marchesotti, & Florent Perronnin. (2012). Towards automatic and flexible concept transfer. CG - Computers and Graphics, 36(6), 622–634.
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel approach to automatic, yet flexible, image concepttransfer; examples of concepts are “romantic”, “earthy”, and “luscious”. The presented method modifies the color content of an input image given only a concept specified by a user in natural language, thereby requiring minimal user input. This method is particularly useful for users who are aware of the message they wish to convey in the transferred image while being unsure of the color combination needed to achieve the corresponding transfer. Our framework is flexible for two reasons. First, the user may select one of two modalities to map input image chromaticities to target concept chromaticities depending on the level of photo-realism required. Second, the user may adjust the intensity level of the concepttransfer to his/her liking with a single parameter. The proposed method uses a convex clustering algorithm, with a novel pruning mechanism, to automatically set the complexity of models of chromatic content. Results show that our approach yields transferred images which effectively represent concepts as confirmed by a user study.
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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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Marc Serra, Olivier Penacchio, Robert Benavente, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Names and Shades of Color for Intrinsic Image Estimation. In 25th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 278–285). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: In the last years, intrinsic image decomposition has gained attention. Most of the state-of-the-art methods are based on the assumption that reflectance changes come along with strong image edges. Recently, user intervention in the recovery problem has proved to be a remarkable source of improvement. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that aims to overcome the shortcomings of pure edge-based methods by introducing strong surface descriptors, such as the color-name descriptor which introduces high-level considerations resembling top-down intervention. We also use a second surface descriptor, termed color-shade, which allows us to include physical considerations derived from the image formation model capturing gradual color surface variations. Both color cues are combined by means of a Markov Random Field. The method is quantitatively tested on the MIT ground truth dataset using different error metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
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Naila Murray, Luca Marchesotti, & Florent Perronnin. (2012). Learning to Rank Images using Semantic and Aesthetic Labels. In 23rd British Machine Vision Conference (110.pp. 1–110.10).
Abstract: Most works on image retrieval from text queries have addressed the problem of retrieving semantically relevant images. However, the ability to assess the aesthetic quality of an image is an increasingly important differentiating factor for search engines. In this work, given a semantic query, we are interested in retrieving images which are semantically relevant and score highly in terms of aesthetics/visual quality. We use large-margin classifiers and rankers to learn statistical models capable of ordering images based on the aesthetic and semantic information. In particular, we compare two families of approaches: while the first one attempts to learn a single ranker which takes into account both semantic and aesthetic information, the second one learns separate semantic and aesthetic models. We carry out a quantitative and qualitative evaluation on a recently-published large-scale dataset and we show that the second family of techniques significantly outperforms the first one.
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Joost Van de Weijer, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, Cordelia Schmid, Ramon Baldrich, Jacob Verbeek, et al. (2012). Color Naming. In Theo Gevers, Arjan Gijsenij, Joost Van de Weijer, & Jan-Mark Geusebroek (Eds.), Color in Computer Vision: Fundamentals and Applications (pp. 287–317). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Ernest Valveny, Robert Benavente, Agata Lapedriza, Miquel Ferrer, Jaume Garcia, & Gemma Sanchez. (2012). Adaptation of a computer programming course to the EXHE requirements: evaluation five years later (Vol. 37).
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Shida Beigpour. (2013). Illumination and object reflectance modeling (Joost Van de Weijer, & Ernest Valveny, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: More realistic and accurate models of the scene illumination and object reflectance can greatly improve the quality of many computer vision and computer graphics tasks. Using such model, a more profound knowledge about the interaction of light with object surfaces can be established which proves crucial to a variety of computer vision applications. In the current work, we investigate the various existing approaches to illumination and reflectance modeling and form an analysis on their shortcomings in capturing the complexity of real-world scenes. Based on this analysis we propose improvements to different aspects of reflectance and illumination estimation in order to more realistically model the real-world scenes in the presence of complex lighting phenomena (i.e, multiple illuminants, interreflections and shadows). Moreover, we captured our own multi-illuminant dataset which consists of complex scenes and illumination conditions both outdoor and in laboratory conditions. In addition we investigate the use of synthetic data to facilitate the construction of datasets and improve the process of obtaining ground-truth information.
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Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Robert Benavente, Olivier Penacchio, Javier Vazquez, Maria Vanrell, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2013). Coloresia: An Interactive Colour Perception Device for the Visually Impaired. In Multimodal Interaction in Image and Video Applications (Vol. 48, pp. 47–66). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: A significative percentage of the human population suffer from impairments in their capacity to distinguish or even see colours. For them, everyday tasks like navigating through a train or metro network map becomes demanding. We present a novel technique for extracting colour information from everyday natural stimuli and presenting it to visually impaired users as pleasant, non-invasive sound. This technique was implemented inside a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) portable device. In this implementation, colour information is extracted from the input image and categorised according to how human observers segment the colour space. This information is subsequently converted into sound and sent to the user via speakers or headphones. In the original implementation, it is possible for the user to send its feedback to reconfigure the system, however several features such as these were not implemented because the current technology is limited.We are confident that the full implementation will be possible in the near future as PDA technology improves.
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Shida Beigpour, Marc Serra, Joost Van de Weijer, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, Olivier Penacchio, et al. (2013). Intrinsic Image Evaluation On Synthetic Complex Scenes. In 20th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 285–289).
Abstract: Scene decomposition into its illuminant, shading, and reflectance intrinsic images is an essential step for scene understanding. Collecting intrinsic image groundtruth data is a laborious task. The assumptions on which the ground-truth
procedures are based limit their application to simple scenes with a single object taken in the absence of indirect lighting and interreflections. We investigate synthetic data for intrinsic image research since the extraction of ground truth is straightforward, and it allows for scenes in more realistic situations (e.g, multiple illuminants and interreflections). With this dataset we aim to motivate researchers to further explore intrinsic image decomposition in complex scenes.
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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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Christophe Rigaud, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Joost Van de Weijer, Jean-Christophe Burie, & Jean-Marc Ogier. (2013). An active contour model for speech balloon detection in comics. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 1240–1244).
Abstract: Comic books constitute an important cultural heritage asset in many countries. Digitization combined with subsequent comic book understanding would enable a variety of new applications, including content-based retrieval and content retargeting. Document understanding in this domain is challenging as comics are semi-structured documents, combining semantically important graphical and textual parts. Few studies have been done in this direction. In this work we detail a novel approach for closed and non-closed speech balloon localization in scanned comic book pages, an essential step towards a fully automatic comic book understanding. The approach is compared with existing methods for closed balloon localization found in the literature and results are presented.
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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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Alicia Fornes, Xavier Otazu, & Josep Llados. (2013). Show through cancellation and image enhancement by multiresolution contrast processing. In 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (pp. 200–204).
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.
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Sandra Jimenez, Xavier Otazu, Valero Laparra, & Jesus Malo. (2013). Chromatic induction and contrast masking: similar models, different goals? In Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVIII (Vol. 8651).
Abstract: Normalization of signals coming from linear sensors is an ubiquitous mechanism of neural adaptation.1 Local interaction between sensors tuned to a particular feature at certain spatial position and neighbor sensors explains a wide range of psychophysical facts including (1) masking of spatial patterns, (2) non-linearities of motion sensors, (3) adaptation of color perception, (4) brightness and chromatic induction, and (5) image quality assessment. Although the above models have formal and qualitative similarities, it does not necessarily mean that the mechanisms involved are pursuing the same statistical goal. For instance, in the case of chromatic mechanisms (disregarding spatial information), different parameters in the normalization give rise to optimal discrimination or adaptation, and different non-linearities may give rise to error minimization or component independence. In the case of spatial sensors (disregarding color information), a number of studies have pointed out the benefits of masking in statistical independence terms. However, such statistical analysis has not been performed for spatio-chromatic induction models where chromatic perception depends on spatial configuration. In this work we investigate whether successful spatio-chromatic induction models,6 increase component independence similarly as previously reported for masking models. Mutual information analysis suggests that seeking an efficient chromatic representation may explain the prevalence of induction effects in spatially simple images. © (2013) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
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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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Javier Vazquez, Robert Benavente, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Naming constraints constancy. In 2nd Joint AVA / BMVA Meeting on Biological and Machine Vision.
Abstract: Different studies have shown that languages from industrialized cultures
share a set of 11 basic colour terms: red, green, blue, yellow, pink, purple, brown, orange, black, white, and grey (Berlin & Kay, 1969, Basic Color Terms, University of California Press)( Kay & Regier, 2003, PNAS, 100, 9085-9089). Some of these studies have also reported the best representatives or focal values of each colour (Boynton and Olson, 1990, Vision Res. 30,1311–1317), (Sturges and Whitfield, 1995, CRA, 20:6, 364–376). Some further studies have provided us with fuzzy datasets for color naming by asking human observers to rate colours in terms of membership values (Benavente -et al-, 2006, CRA. 31:1, 48–56,). Recently, a computational model based on these human ratings has been developed (Benavente -et al-, 2008, JOSA-A, 25:10, 2582-2593). This computational model follows a fuzzy approach to assign a colour name to a particular RGB value. For example, a pixel with a value (255,0,0) will be named 'red' with membership 1, while a cyan pixel with a RGB value of (0, 200, 200) will be considered to be 0.5 green and 0.5 blue. In this work, we show how this colour naming paradigm can be applied to different computer vision tasks. In particular, we report results in colour constancy (Vazquez-Corral -et al-, 2012, IEEE TIP, in press) showing that the classical constraints on either illumination or surface reflectance can be substituted by
the statistical properties encoded in the colour names. [Supported by projects TIN2010-21771-C02-1, CSD2007-00018].
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Xavier Otazu, Olivier Penacchio, & Laura Dempere-Marco. (2012). An investigation into plausible neural mechanisms related to the the CIWaM computational model for brightness induction. In 2nd Joint AVA / BMVA Meeting on Biological and Machine Vision.
Abstract: Brightness induction is the modulation of the perceived intensity of an area by the luminance of surrounding areas. From a purely computational perspective, we built a low-level computational model (CIWaM) of early sensory processing based on multi-resolution wavelets with the aim of replicating brightness and colour (Otazu et al., 2010, Journal of Vision, 10(12):5) induction effects. Furthermore, we successfully used the CIWaM architecture to define a computational saliency model (Murray et al, 2011, CVPR, 433-440; Vanrell et al, submitted to AVA/BMVA'12). From a biological perspective, neurophysiological evidence suggests that perceived brightness information may be explicitly represented in V1. In this work we investigate possible neural mechanisms that offer a plausible explanation for such effects. To this end, we consider the model by Z.Li (Li, 1999, Network:Comput. Neural Syst., 10, 187-212) which is based on biological data and focuses on the part of V1 responsible for contextual influences, namely, layer 2-3 pyramidal cells, interneurons, and horizontal intracortical connections. This model has proven to account for phenomena such as visual saliency, which share with brightness induction the relevant effect of contextual influences (the ones modelled by CIWaM). In the proposed model, the input to the network is derived from a complete multiscale and multiorientation wavelet decomposition taken from the computational model (CIWaM).
This model successfully accounts for well known pyschophysical effects (among them: the White's and modied White's effects, the Todorovic, Chevreul, achromatic ring patterns, and grating induction effects) for static contexts and also for brigthness induction in dynamic contexts defined by modulating the luminance of surrounding areas. From a methodological point of view, we conclude that the results obtained by the computational model (CIWaM) are compatible with the ones obtained by the neurodynamical model proposed here.
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Jaime Moreno, & Xavier Otazu. (2011). Image compression algorithm based on Hilbert scanning of embedded quadTrees: an introduction of the Hi-SET coder. In IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (pp. 1–6).
Abstract: In this work we present an effective and computationally simple algorithm for image compression based on Hilbert Scanning of Embedded quadTrees (Hi-SET). It allows to represent an image as an embedded bitstream along a fractal function. Embedding is an important feature of modern image compression algorithms, in this way Salomon in [1, pg. 614] cite that another feature and perhaps a unique one is the fact of achieving the best quality for the number of bits input by the decoder at any point during the decoding. Hi-SET possesses also this latter feature. Furthermore, the coder is based on a quadtree partition strategy, that applied to image transformation structures such as discrete cosine or wavelet transform allows to obtain an energy clustering both in frequency and space. The coding algorithm is composed of three general steps, using just a list of significant pixels. The implementation of the proposed coder is developed for gray-scale and color image compression. Hi-SET compressed images are, on average, 6.20dB better than the ones obtained by other compression techniques based on the Hilbert scanning. Moreover, Hi-SET improves the image quality in 1.39dB and 1.00dB in gray-scale and color compression, respectively, when compared with JPEG2000 coder.
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