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Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2004). A Regularized Curvature Flow Designed for a Selective Shape Restoration. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 13, 1444–1458.
Abstract: Among all filtering techniques, those based exclu- sively on image level sets (geometric flows) have proven to be the less sensitive to the nature of noise and the most contrast preserving. A common feature to existent curvature flows is that they penalize high curvature, regardless of the curve regularity. This constitutes a major drawback since curvature extreme values are standard descriptors of the contour geometry. We argue that an operator designed with shape recovery purposes should include a term penalizing irregularity in the curvature rather than its magnitude. To this purpose, we present a novel geometric flow that includes a function that measures the degree of local irregularity present in the curve. A main advantage is that it achieves non-trivial steady states representing a smooth model of level curves in a noisy image. Performance of our approach is compared to classical filtering techniques in terms of quality in the restored image/shape and asymptotic behavior. We empirically prove that our approach is the technique that achieves the best compromise between image quality and evolution stabilization.
Keywords: Geometric flows, nonlinear filtering, shape recovery.
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Miguel Oliveira, Angel Sappa, & Victor Santos. (2015). A probabilistic approach for color correction in image mosaicking applications. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 14(2), 508–523.
Abstract: Image mosaicking applications require both geometrical and photometrical registrations between the images that compose the mosaic. This paper proposes a probabilistic color correction algorithm for correcting the photometrical disparities. First, the image to be color corrected is segmented into several regions using mean shift. Then, connected regions are extracted using a region fusion algorithm. Local joint image histograms of each region are modeled as collections of truncated Gaussians using a maximum likelihood estimation procedure. Then, local color palette mapping functions are computed using these sets of Gaussians. The color correction is performed by applying those functions to all the regions of the image. An extensive comparison with ten other state of the art color correction algorithms is presented, using two different image pair data sets. Results show that the proposed approach obtains the best average scores in both data sets and evaluation metrics and is also the most robust to failures.
Keywords: Color correction; image mosaicking; color transfer; color palette mapping functions
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Ferran Diego, Daniel Ponsa, Joan Serrat, & Antonio Lopez. (2011). Video Alignment for Change Detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(7), 1858–1869.
Abstract: In this work, we address the problem of aligning two video sequences. Such alignment refers to synchronization, i.e., the establishment of temporal correspondence between frames of the first and second video, followed by spatial registration of all the temporally corresponding frames. Video synchronization and alignment have been attempted before, but most often in the relatively simple cases of fixed or rigidly attached cameras and simultaneous acquisition. In addition, restrictive assumptions have been applied, including linear time correspondence or the knowledge of the complete trajectories of corresponding scene points; to some extent, these assumptions limit the practical applicability of any solutions developed. We intend to solve the more general problem of aligning video sequences recorded by independently moving cameras that follow similar trajectories, based only on the fusion of image intensity and GPS information. The novelty of our approach is to pose the synchronization as a MAP inference problem on a Bayesian network including the observations from these two sensor types, which have been proved complementary. Alignment results are presented in the context of videos recorded from vehicles driving along the same track at different times, for different road types. In addition, we explore two applications of the proposed video alignment method, both based on change detection between aligned videos. One is the detection of vehicles, which could be of use in ADAS. The other is online difference spotting videos of surveillance rounds.
Keywords: video alignment
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Ariel Amato, Mikhail Mozerov, Andrew Bagdanov, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2011). Accurate Moving Cast Shadow Suppression Based on Local Color Constancy detection. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(10), 2954–2966.
Abstract: This paper describes a novel framework for detection and suppression of properly shadowed regions for most possible scenarios occurring in real video sequences. Our approach requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to 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. We show how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of our method compared with the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that our approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.
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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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Mohammad Rouhani, & Angel Sappa. (2012). Implicit Polynomial Representation through a Fast Fitting Error Estimation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(4), 2089–2098.
Abstract: Impact Factor
This paper presents a simple distance estimation for implicit polynomial fitting. It is computed as the height of a simplex built between the point and the surface (i.e., a triangle in 2-D or a tetrahedron in 3-D), which is used as a coarse but reliable estimation of the orthogonal distance. The proposed distance can be described as a function of the coefficients of the implicit polynomial. Moreover, it is differentiable and has a smooth behavior . Hence, it can be used in any gradient-based optimization. In this paper, its use in a Levenberg-Marquardt framework is shown, which is particularly devoted for nonlinear least squares problems. The proposed estimation is a generalization of the gradient-based distance estimation, which is widely used in the literature. Experimental results, both in 2-D and 3-D data sets, are provided. Comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques are presented, showing the advantages of the proposed approach.
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J. Stöttinger, A. Hanbury, N. Sebe, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Spars Color Interest Points for Image Retrieval and Object Categorization. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(5), 2681–2692.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
IF 2011/2012?: 3.32
Interest point detection is an important research area in the field of image processing and computer vision. In particular, image retrieval and object categorization heavily rely on interest point detection from which local image descriptors are computed for image matching. In general, interest points are based on luminance, and color has been largely ignored. However, the use of color increases the distinctiveness of interest points. The use of color may therefore provide selective search reducing the total number of interest points used for image matching. This paper proposes color interest points for sparse image representation. To reduce the sensitivity to varying imaging conditions, light-invariant interest points are introduced. Color statistics based on occurrence probability lead to color boosted points, which are obtained through saliency-based feature selection. Furthermore, a principal component analysis-based scale selection method is proposed, which gives a robust scale estimation per interest point. From large-scale experiments, it is shown that the proposed color interest point detector has higher repeatability than a luminance-based one. Furthermore, in the context of image retrieval, a reduced and predictable number of color features show an increase in performance compared to state-of-the-art interest points. Finally, in the context of object recognition, for the Pascal VOC 2007 challenge, our method gives comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods using only a small fraction of the features, reducing the computing time considerably.
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R. Valenti, & Theo Gevers. (2012). Combining Head Pose and Eye Location Information for Gaze Estimation. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 802–815.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/12?: 3.32
Head pose and eye location for gaze estimation have been separately studied in numerous works in the literature. Previous research shows that satisfactory accuracy in head pose and eye location estimation can be achieved in constrained settings. However, in the presence of nonfrontal faces, eye locators are not adequate to accurately locate the center of the eyes. On the other hand, head pose estimation techniques are able to deal with these conditions; hence, they may be suited to enhance the accuracy of eye localization. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid scheme is proposed to combine head pose and eye location information to obtain enhanced gaze estimation. To this end, the transformation matrix obtained from the head pose is used to normalize the eye regions, and in turn, the transformation matrix generated by the found eye location is used to correct the pose estimation procedure. The scheme is designed to enhance the accuracy of eye location estimations, particularly in low-resolution videos, to extend the operative range of the eye locators, and to improve the accuracy of the head pose tracker. These enhanced estimations are then combined to obtain a novel visual gaze estimation system, which uses both eye location and head information to refine the gaze estimates. From the experimental results, it can be derived that the proposed unified scheme improves the accuracy of eye estimations by 16% to 23%. Furthermore, it considerably extends its operating range by more than 15° by overcoming the problems introduced by extreme head poses. Moreover, the accuracy of the head pose tracker is improved by 12% to 24%. Finally, the experimentation on the proposed combined gaze estimation system shows that it is accurate (with a mean error between 2° and 5°) and that it can be used in cases where classic approaches would fail without imposing restraints on the position of the head.
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Arjan Gijsenij, R. Lu, Theo Gevers, & De Xu. (2012). Color Constancy for Multiple Light Source. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 697–707.
Abstract: Impact factor 2010: 2.92
Impact factor 2011/2012?: 3.32
Color constancy algorithms are generally based on the simplifying assumption that the spectral distribution of a light source is uniform across scenes. However, in reality, this assumption is often violated due to the presence of multiple light sources. In this paper, we will address more realistic scenarios where the uniform light-source assumption is too restrictive. First, a methodology is proposed to extend existing algorithms by applying color constancy locally to image patches, rather than globally to the entire image. After local (patch-based) illuminant estimation, these estimates are combined into more robust estimations, and a local correction is applied based on a modified diagonal model. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on spectral and real images show that the proposed methodology reduces the influence of two light sources simultaneously present in one scene. If the chromatic difference between these two illuminants is more than 1° , the proposed framework outperforms algorithms based on the uniform light-source assumption (with error-reduction up to approximately 30%). Otherwise, when the chromatic difference is less than 1° and the scene can be considered to contain one (approximately) uniform light source, the performance of the proposed method framework is similar to global color constancy methods.
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Hamdi Dibeklioglu, Albert Ali Salah, & Theo Gevers. (2012). A Statistical Method for 2D Facial Landmarking. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 21(2), 844–858.
Abstract: IF = 3.32
Many facial-analysis approaches rely on robust and accurate automatic facial landmarking to correctly function. In this paper, we describe a statistical method for automatic facial-landmark localization. Our landmarking relies on a parsimonious mixture model of Gabor wavelet features, computed in coarse-to-fine fashion and complemented with a shape prior. We assess the accuracy and the robustness of the proposed approach in extensive cross-database conditions conducted on four face data sets (Face Recognition Grand Challenge, Cohn-Kanade, Bosphorus, and BioID). Our method has 99.33% accuracy on the Bosphorus database and 97.62% accuracy on the BioID database on the average, which improves the state of the art. We show that the method is not significantly affected by low-resolution images, small rotations, facial expressions, and natural occlusions such as beard and mustache. We further test the goodness of the landmarks in a facial expression recognition application and report landmarking-induced improvement over baseline on two separate databases for video-based expression recognition (Cohn-Kanade and BU-4DFE).
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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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Mikhail Mozerov. (2013). Constrained Optical Flow Estimation as a Matching Problem. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 22(5), 2044–2055.
Abstract: In general, discretization in the motion vector domain yields an intractable number of labels. In this paper we propose an approach that can reduce general optical flow to the constrained matching problem by pre-estimating a 2D disparity labeling map of the desired discrete motion vector function. One of the goals of the proposed paper is estimating coarse distribution of motion vectors and then utilizing this distribution as global constraints for discrete optical flow estimation. This pre-estimation is done with a simple frame-to-frame correlation technique also known as the digital symmetric-phase-only-filter (SPOF). We discover a strong correlation between the output of the SPOF and the motion vector distribution of the related optical flow. The two step matching paradigm for optical flow estimation is applied: pixel accuracy (integer flow), and subpixel accuracy estimation. The matching problem is solved by global optimization. Experiments on the Middlebury optical flow datasets confirm our intuitive assumptions about strong correlation between motion vector distribution of optical flow and maximal peaks of SPOF outputs. The overall performance of the proposed method is promising and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Middlebury benchmark.
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Mohammad Rouhani, & Angel Sappa. (2013). The Richer Representation the Better Registration. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 22(12), 5036–5049.
Abstract: In this paper, the registration problem is formulated as a point to model distance minimization. Unlike most of the existing works, which are based on minimizing a point-wise correspondence term, this formulation avoids the correspondence search that is time-consuming. In the first stage, the target set is described through an implicit function by employing a linear least squares fitting. This function can be either an implicit polynomial or an implicit B-spline from a coarse to fine representation. In the second stage, we show how the obtained implicit representation is used as an interface to convert point-to-point registration into point-to-implicit problem. Furthermore, we show that this registration distance is smooth and can be minimized through the Levengberg-Marquardt algorithm. All the formulations presented for both stages are compact and easy to implement. In addition, we show that our registration method can be handled using any implicit representation though some are coarse and others provide finer representations; hence, a tradeoff between speed and accuracy can be set by employing the right implicit function. Experimental results and comparisons in 2D and 3D show the robustness and the speed of convergence of the proposed approach.
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Shida Beigpour, Christian Riess, Joost Van de Weijer, & Elli Angelopoulou. (2014). Multi-Illuminant Estimation with Conditional Random Fields. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(1), 83–95.
Abstract: Most existing color constancy algorithms assume uniform illumination. However, in real-world scenes, this is not often the case. Thus, we propose a novel framework for estimating the colors of multiple illuminants and their spatial distribution in the scene. We formulate this problem as an energy minimization task within a conditional random field over a set of local illuminant estimates. In order to quantitatively evaluate the proposed method, we created a novel data set of two-dominant-illuminant images comprised of laboratory, indoor, and outdoor scenes. Unlike prior work, our database includes accurate pixel-wise ground truth illuminant information. The performance of our method is evaluated on multiple data sets. Experimental results show that our framework clearly outperforms single illuminant estimators as well as a recently proposed multi-illuminant estimation approach.
Keywords: color constancy; CRF; multi-illuminant
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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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