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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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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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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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Shida Beigpour, Joost Van de Weijer, & Michael Felsberg. (2014). Painting-91: A Large Scale Database for Computational Painting Categorization. MVAP - Machine Vision and Applications, 25(6), 1385–1397.
Abstract: Computer analysis of visual art, especially paintings, is an interesting cross-disciplinary research domain. Most of the research in the analysis of paintings involve medium to small range datasets with own specific settings. Interestingly, significant progress has been made in the field of object and scene recognition lately. A key factor in this success is the introduction and availability of benchmark datasets for evaluation. Surprisingly, such a benchmark setup is still missing in the area of computational painting categorization. In this work, we propose a novel large scale dataset of digital paintings. The dataset consists of paintings from 91 different painters. We further show three applications of our dataset namely: artist categorization, style classification and saliency detection. We investigate how local and global features popular in image classification perform for the tasks of artist and style categorization. For both categorization tasks, our experimental results suggest that combining multiple features significantly improves the final performance. We show that state-of-the-art computer vision methods can correctly classify 50 % of unseen paintings to its painter in a large dataset and correctly attribute its artistic style in over 60 % of the cases. Additionally, we explore the task of saliency detection on paintings and show experimental findings using state-of-the-art saliency estimation algorithms.
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Xavier Otazu, & Oriol Pujol. (2006). Wavelet based approach to cluster analysis. Application on low dimensional data sets. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 27(14), 1590–1605.
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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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Eduard Vazquez, Ramon Baldrich, Joost Van de Weijer, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Describing Reflectances for Colour Segmentation Robust to Shadows, Highlights and Textures. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 33(5), 917–930.
Abstract: The segmentation of a single material reflectance is a challenging problem due to the considerable variation in image measurements caused by the geometry of the object, shadows, and specularities. The combination of these effects has been modeled by the dichromatic reflection model. However, the application of the model to real-world images is limited due to unknown acquisition parameters and compression artifacts. In this paper, we present a robust model for the shape of a single material reflectance in histogram space. The method is based on a multilocal creaseness analysis of the histogram which results in a set of ridges representing the material reflectances. The segmentation method derived from these ridges is robust to both shadow, shading and specularities, and texture in real-world images. We further complete the method by incorporating prior knowledge from image statistics, and incorporate spatial coherence by using multiscale color contrast information. Results obtained show that our method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation methods on a widely used segmentation benchmark, having as a main characteristic its excellent performance in the presence of shadows and highlights at low computational cost.
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Arjan Gijsenij, Theo Gevers, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2012). Improving Color Constancy by Photometric Edge Weighting. TPAMI - IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 34(5), 918–929.
Abstract: : Edge-based color constancy methods make use of image derivatives to estimate the illuminant. However, different edge types exist in real-world images such as material, shadow and highlight edges. These different edge types may have a distinctive influence on the performance of the illuminant estimation. Therefore, in this paper, an extensive analysis is provided of different edge types on the performance of edge-based color constancy methods. First, an edge-based taxonomy is presented classifying edge types based on their photometric properties (e.g. material, shadow-geometry and highlights). Then, a performance evaluation of edge-based color constancy is provided using these different edge types. From this performance evaluation it is derived that specular and shadow edge types are more valuable than material edges for the estimation of the illuminant. To this end, the (iterative) weighted Grey-Edge algorithm is proposed in which these edge types are more emphasized for the estimation of the illuminant. Images that are recorded under controlled circumstances demonstrate that the proposed iterative weighted Grey-Edge algorithm based on highlights reduces the median angular error with approximately $25\%$. In an uncontrolled environment, improvements in angular error up to $11\%$ are obtained with respect to regular edge-based color constancy.
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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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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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C. Alejandro Parraga, Jordi Roca, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Sophie Wuerger. (2014). Limitations of visual gamma corrections in LCD displays. Dis - Displays, 35(5), 227–239.
Abstract: A method for estimating the non-linear gamma transfer function of liquid–crystal displays (LCDs) without the need of a photometric measurement device was described by Xiao et al. (2011) [1]. It relies on observer’s judgments of visual luminance by presenting eight half-tone patterns with luminances from 1/9 to 8/9 of the maximum value of each colour channel. These half-tone patterns were distributed over the screen both over the vertical and horizontal viewing axes. We conducted a series of photometric and psychophysical measurements (consisting in the simultaneous presentation of half-tone patterns in each trial) to evaluate whether the angular dependency of the light generated by three different LCD technologies would bias the results of these gamma transfer function estimations. Our results show that there are significant differences between the gamma transfer functions measured and produced by observers at different viewing angles. We suggest appropriate modifications to the Xiao et al. paradigm to counterbalance these artefacts which also have the advantage of shortening the amount of time spent in collecting the psychophysical measurements.
Keywords: Display calibration; Psychophysics; Perceptual; Visual gamma correction; Luminance matching; Observer-based calibration
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Javier Vazquez, & Maria Vanrell. (2009). A new cone activation-based natural images dataset. PER - Perception, 36, 180.
Abstract: We generated a new dataset of digital natural images where each colour plane corresponds to the human LMS (long-, medium-, short-wavelength) cone activations. The images were chosen to represent five different visual environments (eg forest, seaside, mountain snow, urban, motorways) and were taken under natural illumination at different times of day. At the bottom-left corner of each picture there was a matte grey ball of approximately constant spectral reflectance (across the camera's response spectrum,) and nearly Lambertian reflective properties, which allows to compute (and remove, if necessary) the illuminant's colour and intensity. The camera (Sigma Foveon SD10) was calibrated by measuring its sensor's spectral responses using a set of 31 spectrally narrowband interference filters. This allowed conversion of the final camera-dependent RGB colour space into the Smith and Pokorny (1975) cone activation space by means of a polynomial transformation, optimised for a set of 1269 Munsell chip reflectances. This new method is an improvement over the usual 3 × 3 matrix transformation which is only accurate for spectrally-narrowband colours. The camera-to-LMS transformation can be recalculated to consider other non-human visual systems. The dataset is available to download from our website.
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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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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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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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Javier Vazquez, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2009). Ordinal pairwise method for natural images comparison. PER - Perception, 38, 180.
Abstract: 38(Suppl.)ECVP Abstract Supplement
We developed a new psychophysical method to compare different colour appearance models when applied to natural scenes. The method was as follows: two images (processed by different algorithms) were displayed on a CRT monitor and observers were asked to select the most natural of them. The original images were gathered by means of a calibrated trichromatic digital camera and presented one on top of the other on a calibrated screen. The selection was made by pressing on a 6-button IR box, which allowed observers to consider not only the most natural but to rate their selection. The rating system allowed observers to register how much more natural was their chosen image (eg, much more, definitely more, slightly more), which gave us valuable extra information on the selection process. The results were analysed considering both the selection as a binary choice (using Thurstone's law of comparative judgement) and using Bradley-Terry method for ordinal comparison. Our results show a significant difference in the rating scales obtained. Although this method has been used in colour constancy algorithm comparisons, its uses are much wider, eg to compare algorithms of image compression, rendering, recolouring, etc.
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Robert Benavente, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2009). Colour categories boundaries are better defined in contextual conditions. PER - Perception, 38, 36.
Abstract: In a previous experiment [Parraga et al, 2009 Journal of Imaging Science and Technology 53(3)] the boundaries between basic colour categories were measured by asking subjects to categorize colour samples presented in isolation (ie on a dark background) using a YES/NO paradigm. Results showed that some boundaries (eg green – blue) were very diffuse and the subjects' answers presented bimodal distributions, which were attributed to the emergence of non-basic categories in those regions (eg turquoise). To confirm these results we performed a new experiment focussed on the boundaries where bimodal distributions were more evident. In this new experiment rectangular colour samples were presented surrounded by random colour patches to simulate contextual conditions on a calibrated CRT monitor. The names of two neighbouring colours were shown at the bottom of the screen and subjects selected the boundary between these colours by controlling the chromaticity of the central patch, sliding it across these categories' frontier. Results show that in this new experimental paradigm, the formerly uncertain inter-colour category boundaries are better defined and the dispersions (ie the bimodal distributions) that occurred in the previous experiment disappear. These results may provide further support to Berlin and Kay's basic colour terms theory.
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