Javier Vazquez, Robert Benavente, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Naming constraints constancy. In 2nd Joint AVA / BMVA Meeting on Biological and Machine Vision.
Abstract: Different studies have shown that languages from industrialized cultures
share a set of 11 basic colour terms: red, green, blue, yellow, pink, purple, brown, orange, black, white, and grey (Berlin & Kay, 1969, Basic Color Terms, University of California Press)( Kay & Regier, 2003, PNAS, 100, 9085-9089). Some of these studies have also reported the best representatives or focal values of each colour (Boynton and Olson, 1990, Vision Res. 30,1311–1317), (Sturges and Whitfield, 1995, CRA, 20:6, 364–376). Some further studies have provided us with fuzzy datasets for color naming by asking human observers to rate colours in terms of membership values (Benavente -et al-, 2006, CRA. 31:1, 48–56,). Recently, a computational model based on these human ratings has been developed (Benavente -et al-, 2008, JOSA-A, 25:10, 2582-2593). This computational model follows a fuzzy approach to assign a colour name to a particular RGB value. For example, a pixel with a value (255,0,0) will be named 'red' with membership 1, while a cyan pixel with a RGB value of (0, 200, 200) will be considered to be 0.5 green and 0.5 blue. In this work, we show how this colour naming paradigm can be applied to different computer vision tasks. In particular, we report results in colour constancy (Vazquez-Corral -et al-, 2012, IEEE TIP, in press) showing that the classical constraints on either illumination or surface reflectance can be substituted by
the statistical properties encoded in the colour names. [Supported by projects TIN2010-21771-C02-1, CSD2007-00018].
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Jordi Roca, Maria Vanrell, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2012). What is constant in colour constancy? In 6th European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging and Vision (pp. 337–343).
Abstract: Color constancy refers to the ability of the human visual system to stabilize
the color appearance of surfaces under an illuminant change. In this work we studied how the interrelations among nine colors are perceived under illuminant changes, particularly whether they remain stable across 10 different conditions (5 illuminants and 2 backgrounds). To do so we have used a paradigm that measures several colors under an immersive state of adaptation. From our measures we defined a perceptual structure descriptor that is up to 87% stable over all conditions, suggesting that color category features could be used to predict color constancy. This is in agreement with previous results on the stability of border categories [1,2] and with computational color constancy
algorithms [3] for estimating the scene illuminant.
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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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Aleksandr Setkov, Fabio Martinez Carillo, Michele Gouiffes, Christian Jacquemin, Maria Vanrell, & Ramon Baldrich. (2015). DAcImPro: A Novel Database of Acquired Image Projections and Its Application to Object Recognition. In Advances in Visual Computing. Proceedings of 11th International Symposium, ISVC 2015 Part II (Vol. 9475, pp. 463–473). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: Projector-camera systems are designed to improve the projection quality by comparing original images with their captured projections, which is usually complicated due to high photometric and geometric variations. Many research works address this problem using their own test data which makes it extremely difficult to compare different proposals. This paper has two main contributions. Firstly, we introduce a new database of acquired image projections (DAcImPro) that, covering photometric and geometric conditions and providing data for ground-truth computation, can serve to evaluate different algorithms in projector-camera systems. Secondly, a new object recognition scenario from acquired projections is presented, which could be of a great interest in such domains, as home video projections and public presentations. We show that the task is more challenging than the classical recognition problem and thus requires additional pre-processing, such as color compensation or projection area selection.
Keywords: Projector-camera systems; Feature descriptors; Object recognition
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Ivet Rafegas, & Maria Vanrell. (2016). Color spaces emerging from deep convolutional networks. In 24th Color and Imaging Conference (pp. 225–230).
Abstract: Award for the best interactive session
Defining color spaces that provide a good encoding of spatio-chromatic properties of color surfaces is an open problem in color science [8, 22]. Related to this, in computer vision the fusion of color with local image features has been studied and evaluated [16]. In human vision research, the cells which are selective to specific color hues along the visual pathway are also a focus of attention [7, 14]. In line with these research aims, in this paper we study how color is encoded in a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that has been trained on more than one million natural images for object recognition. These convolutional nets achieve impressive performance in computer vision, and rival the representations in human brain. In this paper we explore how color is represented in a CNN architecture that can give some intuition about efficient spatio-chromatic representations. In convolutional layers the activation of a neuron is related to a spatial filter, that combines spatio-chromatic representations. We use an inverted version of it to explore the properties. Using a series of unsupervised methods we classify different type of neurons depending on the color axes they define and we propose an index of color-selectivity of a neuron. We estimate the main color axes that emerge from this trained net and we prove that colorselectivity of neurons decreases from early to deeper layers.
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Ivet Rafegas, & Maria Vanrell. (2016). Colour Visual Coding in trained Deep Neural Networks. In European Conference on Visual Perception.
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Ivet Rafegas, & Maria Vanrell. (2017). Color representation in CNNs: parallelisms with biological vision. In ICCV Workshop on Mutual Benefits ofr Cognitive and Computer Vision.
Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained for object recognition tasks present representational capabilities approaching to primate visual systems [1]. This provides a computational framework to explore how image features
are efficiently represented. Here, we dissect a trained CNN
[2] to study how color is represented. We use a classical methodology used in physiology that is measuring index of selectivity of individual neurons to specific features. We use ImageNet Dataset [20] images and synthetic versions
of them to quantify color tuning properties of artificial neurons to provide a classification of the network population.
We conclude three main levels of color representation showing some parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a decomposition in a circular hue space to represent single color regions with a wider hue sampling beyond the first
layer (V2), (b) the emergence of opponent low-dimensional spaces in early stages to represent color edges (V1); and (c) a strong entanglement between color and shape patterns representing object-parts (e.g. wheel of a car), objectshapes (e.g. faces) or object-surrounds configurations (e.g. blue sky surrounding an object) in deeper layers (V4 or IT).
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Hassan Ahmed Sial, S. Sancho, Ramon Baldrich, Robert Benavente, & Maria Vanrell. (2018). Color-based data augmentation for Reflectance Estimation. In 26th Color Imaging Conference (pp. 284–289).
Abstract: Deep convolutional architectures have shown to be successful frameworks to solve generic computer vision problems. The estimation of intrinsic reflectance from single image is not a solved problem yet. Encoder-Decoder architectures are a perfect approach for pixel-wise reflectance estimation, although it usually suffers from the lack of large datasets. Lack of data can be partially solved with data augmentation, however usual techniques focus on geometric changes which does not help for reflectance estimation. In this paper we propose a color-based data augmentation technique that extends the training data by increasing the variability of chromaticity. Rotation on the red-green blue-yellow plane of an opponent space enable to increase the training set in a coherent and sound way that improves network generalization capability for reflectance estimation. We perform some experiments on the Sintel dataset showing that our color-based augmentation increase performance and overcomes one of the state-of-the-art methods.
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Hassan Ahmed Sial, Ramon Baldrich, Maria Vanrell, & Dimitris Samaras. (2020). Light Direction and Color Estimation from Single Image with Deep Regression. In London Imaging Conference.
Abstract: We present a method to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source from a single image. Our method is based on two main ideas: (a) we use a new synthetic dataset with strong shadow effects with similar constraints to the SID dataset; (b) we define a deep architecture trained on the mentioned dataset to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source. Apart from showing good performance on synthetic images, we additionally propose a preliminary procedure to obtain light positions of the Multi-Illumination dataset, and, in this way, we also prove that our trained model achieves good performance when it is applied to real scenes.
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Sagnik Das, Hassan Ahmed Sial, Ke Ma, Ramon Baldrich, Maria Vanrell, & Dimitris Samaras. (2020). Intrinsic Decomposition of Document Images In-the-Wild. In 31st British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: Automatic document content processing is affected by artifacts caused by the shape
of the paper, non-uniform and diverse color of lighting conditions. Fully-supervised
methods on real data are impossible due to the large amount of data needed. Hence, the
current state of the art deep learning models are trained on fully or partially synthetic images. However, document shadow or shading removal results still suffer because: (a) prior methods rely on uniformity of local color statistics, which limit their application on real-scenarios with complex document shapes and textures and; (b) synthetic or hybrid datasets with non-realistic, simulated lighting conditions are used to train the models. In this paper we tackle these problems with our two main contributions. First, a physically constrained learning-based method that directly estimates document reflectance based on intrinsic image formation which generalizes to challenging illumination conditions. Second, a new dataset that clearly improves previous synthetic ones, by adding a large range of realistic shading and diverse multi-illuminant conditions, uniquely customized to deal with documents in-the-wild. The proposed architecture works in two steps. First, a white balancing module neutralizes the color of the illumination on the input image. Based on the proposed multi-illuminant dataset we achieve a good white-balancing in really difficult conditions. Second, the shading separation module accurately disentangles the shading and paper material in a self-supervised manner where only the synthetic texture is used as a weak training signal (obviating the need for very costly ground truth with disentangled versions of shading and reflectance). The proposed approach leads to significant generalization of document reflectance estimation in real scenes with challenging illumination. We extensively evaluate on the real benchmark datasets available for intrinsic image decomposition and document shadow removal tasks. Our reflectance estimation scheme, when used as a pre-processing step of an OCR pipeline, shows a 21% improvement of character error rate (CER), thus, proving the practical applicability. The data and code will be available at: https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/DocIIW.
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Susana Alvarez, Anna Salvatella, Maria Vanrell, & Xavier Otazu. (2012). Low-dimensional and Comprehensive Color Texture Description. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(I), 54–67.
Abstract: Image retrieval can be dealt by combining standard descriptors, such as those of MPEG-7, which are defined independently for each visual cue (e.g. SCD or CLD for Color, HTD for texture or EHD for edges).
A common problem is to combine similarities coming from descriptors representing different concepts in different spaces. In this paper we propose a color texture description that bypasses this problem from its inherent definition. It is based on a low dimensional space with 6 perceptual axes. Texture is described in a 3D space derived from a direct implementation of the original Julesz’s Texton theory and color is described in a 3D perceptual space. This early fusion through the blob concept in these two bounded spaces avoids the problem and allows us to derive a sparse color-texture descriptor that achieves similar performance compared to MPEG-7 in image retrieval. Moreover, our descriptor presents comprehensive qualities since it can also be applied either in segmentation or browsing: (a) a dense image representation is defined from the descriptor showing a reasonable performance in locating texture patterns included in complex images; and (b) a vocabulary of basic terms is derived to build an intermediate level descriptor in natural language improving browsing by bridging semantic gap
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Maria Vanrell, Felipe Lumbreras, A. Pujol, Ramon Baldrich, Josep Llados, & Juan J. Villanueva. (2001). Colour Normalisation Based on Background Information..
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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Modulating Shape Features by Color Attention for Object Recognition. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(1), 49–64.
Abstract: Bag-of-words based image representation is a successful approach for object recognition. Generally, the subsequent stages of the process: feature detection,feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, it was found that the combination of different image cues, such as shape and color, often obtains below expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using ultiple cues by separately processing the shape and color cues and combining them by modulating the shape features by category specific color attention. Color is used to compute bottom up and top-down attention maps. Subsequently, these color attention maps are used to modulate the weights of the shape features. In regions with higher attention shape features are given more weight than in regions with low attention. We compare our approach with existing methods that combine color and shape cues on five data sets containing varied importance of both cues, namely, Soccer (color predominance), Flower (color and hape parity), PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2009 (shape predominance) and Caltech-101 (color co-interference). The experiments clearly demonstrate that in all five data sets our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods for combining color and shape information.
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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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