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.

Abstract: State-of-the-art texture descriptors typically operate on grey scale images while ignoring color information. A common way to obtain a joint color-texture representation is to combine the two visual cues at the pixel level. However, such an approach provides sub-optimal results for texture categorisation task.
In this paper we investigate how to optimally exploit color information for texture recognition. We evaluate a variety of color descriptors, popular in image classification, for texture categorisation. In addition we analyze different fusion approaches to combine color and texture cues. Experiments are conducted on the challenging scenes and 10 class texture datasets. Our experiments clearly suggest that in all cases color names provide the best performance. Late fusion is the best strategy to combine color and texture. By selecting the best color descriptor with optimal fusion strategy provides a gain of 5% to 8% compared to texture alone on scenes and texture datasets.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating high-level semantic labels for videos of recorded people by means of analysing their facial expressions. This problem, to which we refer as facial behavior categorization, is a weakly-supervised learning problem where we do not have access to frame-by-frame facial gesture annotations but only weak-labels at the video level are available. Therefore, the goal is to learn a set of discriminative expressions and how they determine the video weak-labels. Facial behavior categorization can be posed as a Multi-Instance-Learning (MIL) problem and we propose a novel MIL method called Regularized Multi-Concept MIL to solve it. In contrast to previous approaches applied in facial behavior analysis, RMC-MIL follows a Multi-Concept assumption which allows different facial expressions (concepts) to contribute differently to the video-label. Moreover, to handle with the high-dimensional nature of facial-descriptors, RMC-MIL uses a discriminative approach to model the concepts and structured sparsity regularization to discard non-informative features. RMC-MIL is posed as a convex-constrained optimization problem where all the parameters are jointly learned using the Projected-Quasi-Newton method. In our experiments, we use two public data-sets to show the advantages of the Regularized Multi-Concept approach and its improvement compared to existing MIL methods. RMC-MIL outperforms state-of-the-art results in the UNBC data-set for pain detection.

Abstract: Intrinsic characterization of scenes is often the best way to overcome the illumination variability artifacts that complicate most computer vision problems, from 3D reconstruction to object or material recognition. This paper examines the deficiency of existing intrinsic image models to accurately account for the effects of illuminant color and sensor characteristics in the estimation of intrinsic images and presents a generic framework which incorporates insights from color constancy research to the intrinsic image decomposition problem. The proposed mathematical formulation includes information about the color of the illuminant and the effects of the camera sensors, both of which modify the observed color of the reflectance of the objects in the scene during the acquisition process. By modeling these effects, we get a “truly intrinsic” reflectance image, which we call absolute reflectance, which is invariant to changes of illuminant or camera sensors. This model allows us to represent a wide range of intrinsic image decompositions depending on the specific assumptions on the geometric properties of the scene configuration and the spectral properties of the light source and the acquisition system, thus unifying previous models in a single general framework. We demonstrate that even partial information about sensors improves significantly the estimated reflectance images, thus making our method applicable for a wide range of sensors. We validate our general intrinsic image framework experimentally with both synthetic data and natural images.