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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Marc Serra, Olivier Penacchio, Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell, & Dimitris Samaras. (2014). The Photometry of Intrinsic Images. In 27th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1494–1501).
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.
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M. Danelljan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Michael Felsberg, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2014). Adaptive color attributes for real-time visual tracking. In 27th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 1090–1097).
Abstract: Visual tracking is a challenging problem in computer vision. Most state-of-the-art visual trackers either rely on luminance information or use simple color representations for image description. Contrary to visual tracking, for object
recognition and detection, sophisticated color features when combined with luminance have shown to provide excellent performance. Due to the complexity of the tracking problem, the desired color feature should be computationally
efficient, and possess a certain amount of photometric invariance while maintaining high discriminative power.
This paper investigates the contribution of color in a tracking-by-detection framework. Our results suggest that color attributes provides superior performance for visual tracking. We further propose an adaptive low-dimensional
variant of color attributes. Both quantitative and attributebased evaluations are performed on 41 challenging benchmark color sequences. The proposed approach improves the baseline intensity-based tracker by 24% in median distance precision. Furthermore, we show that our approach outperforms
state-of-the-art tracking methods while running at more than 100 frames per second.
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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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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. (2014). Color Vision, Computational Methods for. In Dieter Jaeger, & Ranu Jung (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience (pp. 1–11). Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The study of color vision has been aided by a whole battery of computational methods that attempt to describe the mechanisms that lead to our perception of colors in terms of the information-processing properties of the visual system. Their scope is highly interdisciplinary, linking apparently dissimilar disciplines such as mathematics, physics, computer science, neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology. Since the sensation of color is a feature of our brains, computational approaches usually include biological features of neural systems in their descriptions, from retinal light-receptor interaction to subcortical color opponency, cortical signal decoding, and color categorization. They produce hypotheses that are usually tested by behavioral or psychophysical experiments.
Keywords: Color computational vision; Computational neuroscience of color
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Xim Cerda-Company, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Xavier Otazu. (2014). Which tone-mapping is the best? A comparative study of tone-mapping perceived quality. In Perception (Vol. 43, 106).
Abstract: Perception 43 ECVP Abstract Supplement
High-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging refers to the methods designed to increase the brightness dynamic range present in standard digital imaging techniques. This increase is achieved by taking the same picture under di erent exposure values and mapping the intensity levels into a single image by way of a tone-mapping operator (TMO). Currently, there is no agreement on how to evaluate the quality
of di erent TMOs. In this work we psychophysically evaluate 15 di erent TMOs obtaining rankings based on the perceived properties of the resulting tone-mapped images. We performed two di erent experiments on a CRT calibrated display using 10 subjects: (1) a study of the internal relationships between grey-levels and (2) a pairwise comparison of the resulting 15 tone-mapped images. In (1) observers internally matched the grey-levels to a reference inside the tone-mapped images and in the real scene. In (2) observers performed a pairwise comparison of the tone-mapped images alongside the real scene. We obtained two rankings of the TMOs according their performance. In (1) the best algorithm
was ICAM by J.Kuang et al (2007) and in (2) the best algorithm was a TMO by Krawczyk et al (2005). Our results also show no correlation between these two rankings.
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Ricard Balague. (2014). Exploring the combination of color cues for intrinsic image decomposition (Vol. 178). Master's thesis, , .
Abstract: Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging problem that consists in separating an image into its physical characteristics: reflectance and shading. This problem can be solved in different ways, but most methods have combined information from several visual cues. In this work we describe an extension of an existing method proposed by Serra et al. which considers two color descriptors and combines them by means of a Markov Random Field. We analyze in depth the weak points of the method and we explore more possibilities to use in both descriptors. The proposed extension depends on the combination of the cues considered to overcome some of the limitations of the original method. Our approach is tested on the MIT dataset and Beigpour et al. dataset, which contain images of real objects acquired under controlled conditions and synthetic images respectively, with their corresponding ground truth.
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Joost Van de Weijer, & Fahad Shahbaz Khan. (2013). Fusing Color and Shape for Bag-of-Words Based Object Recognition. In 4th Computational Color Imaging Workshop (Vol. 7786, pp. 25–34). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
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.
Keywords: Object Recognition; color features; bag-of-words; image classification
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Joost Van de Weijer, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, & Marc Masana. (2013). Interactive Visual and Semantic Image Retrieval. In Angel Sappa, & Jordi Vitria (Eds.), Multimodal Interaction in Image and Video Applications (Vol. 48, pp. 31–35). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: One direct consequence of recent advances in digital visual data generation and the direct availability of this information through the World-Wide Web, is a urgent demand for efficient image retrieval systems. The objective of image retrieval is to allow users to efficiently browse through this abundance of images. Due to the non-expert nature of the majority of the internet users, such systems should be user friendly, and therefore avoid complex user interfaces. In this chapter we investigate how high-level information provided by recently developed object recognition techniques can improve interactive image retrieval. Wel apply a bagof- word based image representation method to automatically classify images in a number of categories. These additional labels are then applied to improve the image retrieval system. Next to these high-level semantic labels, we also apply a low-level image description to describe the composition and color scheme of the scene. Both descriptions are incorporated in a user feedback image retrieval setting. The main objective is to show that automatic labeling of images with semantic labels can improve image retrieval results.
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Joost Van de Weijer, Andrew Bagdanov, Antonio Lopez, & Michael Felsberg. (2013). Coloring Action Recognition in Still Images. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 105(3), 205–221.
Abstract: In this article we investigate the problem of human action recognition in static images. By action recognition we intend a class of problems which includes both action classification and action detection (i.e. simultaneous localization and classification). Bag-of-words image representations yield promising results for action classification, and deformable part models perform very well object detection. The representations for action recognition typically use only shape cues and ignore color information. Inspired by the recent success of color in image classification and object detection, we investigate the potential of color for action classification and detection in static images. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of color descriptors and fusion approaches for action recognition. Experiments were conducted on the three datasets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010 and Stanford-40. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating color information considerably improves recognition performance, and that a descriptor based on color names outperforms pure color descriptors. Our experiments demonstrate that late fusion of color and shape information outperforms other approaches on action recognition. Finally, we show that the different color–shape fusion approaches result in complementary information and combining them yields state-of-the-art performance for action classification.
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Jordi Roca, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2013). Chromatic settings and the structural color constancy index. JV - Journal of Vision, 13(4-3), 1–26.
Abstract: Color constancy is usually measured by achromatic setting, asymmetric matching, or color naming paradigms, whose results are interpreted in terms of indexes and models that arguably do not capture the full complexity of the phenomenon. Here we propose a new paradigm, chromatic setting, which allows a more comprehensive characterization of color constancy through the measurement of multiple points in color space under immersive adaptation. We demonstrated its feasibility by assessing the consistency of subjects' responses over time. The paradigm was applied to two-dimensional (2-D) Mondrian stimuli under three different illuminants, and the results were used to fit a set of linear color constancy models. The use of multiple colors improved the precision of more complex linear models compared to the popular diagonal model computed from gray. Our results show that a diagonal plus translation matrix that models mechanisms other than cone gain might be best suited to explain the phenomenon. Additionally, we calculated a number of color constancy indices for several points in color space, and our results suggest that interrelations among colors are not as uniform as previously believed. To account for this variability, we developed a new structural color constancy index that takes into account the magnitude and orientation of the chromatic shift in addition to the interrelations among colors and memory effects.
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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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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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A.Gonzalez, 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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Rahat Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Damien Muselet. (2013). Towards multispectral data acquisition with hand-held devices. In 20th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 2053–2057).
Abstract: We propose a method to acquire multispectral data with handheld devices with front-mounted RGB cameras. We propose to use the display of the device as an illuminant while the camera captures images illuminated by the red, green and
blue primaries of the display. Three illuminants and three response functions of the camera lead to nine response values which are used for reflectance estimation. Results are promising and show that the accuracy of the spectral reconstruction improves in the range from 30-40% over the spectral
reconstruction based on a single illuminant. Furthermore, we propose to compute sensor-illuminant aware linear basis by discarding the part of the reflectances that falls in the sensorilluminant null-space. We show experimentally that optimizing reflectance estimation on these new basis functions decreases
the RMSE significantly over basis functions that are independent to sensor-illuminant. We conclude that, multispectral data acquisition is potentially possible with consumer hand-held devices such as tablets, mobiles, and laptops, opening up applications which are currently considered to be unrealistic.
Keywords: Multispectral; mobile devices; color measurements
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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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