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: In this article we provide an analysis of existing methods for the incorporation of color in bag-of-words based image representations. We propose a list of desired properties on which bases fusing methods can be compared. We discuss existing methods and indicate shortcomings of the two well-known fusing methods, namely early and late fusion. Several recent works have addressed these shortcomings by exploiting top-down information in the bag-of-words pipeline: color attention which is motivated from human vision, and Portmanteau vocabularies which are based on information theoretic compression of product vocabularies. We point out several remaining challenges in cue fusion and provide directions for future research.

Abstract: Color and texture are visual cues of different nature, their integration in an useful visual descriptor is not an easy problem. One way to combine both features is to compute spatial texture descriptors independently on each color channel. Another way is to do the integration at the descriptor level. In this case the problem of normalizing both cues arises. In this paper we solve the latest problem by fusing color and texture through distances in texton spaces. Textons are the attributes of image blobs and they are responsible for texture discrimination as defined in Julesz’s Texton theory. We describe them in two low-dimensional and uniform spaces, namely, shape and color. The dissimilarity between color texture images is computed by combining the distances in these two spaces. Following this approach, we propose our TCD descriptor which outperforms current state of art methods in the two different approaches mentioned above, early combination with LBP and late combination with MPEG-7. This is done on an image retrieval experiment over a highly diverse texture dataset from Corel.

Abstract: This work is a part of a surveillance system where content- based image retrieval is done in terms of people appearance. Given an image of a person, our work provides an automatic description of his clothing according to the colour, texture and structural composition of its garments. We present a two-stage process composed by image segmentation and a region-based interpretation. We segment an image by modelling it due to an attributed graph and applying a hybrid method that follows a split-and-merge strategy. We propose the interpretation of five cloth combinations that are modelled in a graph structure in terms of region features. The interpretation is viewed as a graph matching with an associated cost between the segmentation and the cloth models. Fi- nally, we have tested the process with a ground-truth of one hundred images.

Abstract: On September 8, 2001 around 2 h UT, the largest uranian moon, Titania, occulted Hipparcos star 106829 (alias SAO 164538, a V=7.2, K0 III star). This was the first-ever observed occultation by this satellite, a rare event as Titania subtends only 0.11 arcsec on the sky. The star's unusual brightness allowed many observers, both amateurs or professionals, to monitor this unique event, providing fifty-seven occultations chords over three continents, all reported here. Selecting the best 27 occultation chords, and assuming a circular limb, we derive Titania's radius: View the MathML source (1-σ error bar). This implies a density of View the MathML source using the value View the MathML source derived by Taylor [Taylor, D.B., 1998. Astron. Astrophys. 330, 362–374]. We do not detect any significant difference between equatorial and polar radii, in the limit View the MathML source, in agreement with Voyager limb image retrieval during the 1986 flyby. Titania's offset with respect to the DE405 + URA027 (based on GUST86 theory) ephemeris is derived: ΔαTcos(δT)=−108±13 mas and ΔδT=−62±7 mas (ICRF J2000.0 system). Most of this offset is attributable to a Uranus' barycentric offset with respect to DE405, that we estimate to be: View the MathML source and ΔδU=−85±25 mas at the moment of occultation. This offset is confirmed by another Titania stellar occultation observed on August 1st, 2003, which provides an offset of ΔαTcos(δT)=−127±20 mas and ΔδT=−97±13 mas for the satellite. The combined ingress and egress data do not show any significant hint for atmospheric refraction, allowing us to set surface pressure limits at the level of 10–20 nbar. More specifically, we find an upper limit of 13 nbar (1-σ level) at 70 K and 17 nbar at 80 K, for a putative isothermal CO2 atmosphere. We also provide an upper limit of 8 nbar for a possible CH4 atmosphere, and 22 nbar for pure N2, again at the 1-σ level. We finally constrain the stellar size using the time-resolved star disappearance and reappearance at ingress and egress. We find an angular diameter of 0.54±0.03 mas (corresponding to View the MathML source projected at Titania). With a distance of 170±25 parsecs, this corresponds to a radius of 9.8±0.2 solar radii for HIP 106829, typical of a K0 III giant.