Abstract: The estimation of the illuminant of a scene from a digital image has been the goal of a large amount of research in computer vision. Color constancy algorithms have dealt with this problem by defining different heuristics to select a unique solution from within the feasible set. The performance of these algorithms has shown that there is still a long way to go to globally solve this problem as a preliminary step in computer vision. In general, performance evaluation has been done by comparing the angular error between the estimated chromaticity and the chromaticity of a canonical illuminant, which is highly dependent on the image dataset. Recently, some workers have used high-level constraints to estimate illuminants; in this case selection is based on increasing the performance on the subsequent steps of the systems. In this paper we propose a new performance measure, the perceptual angular error. It evaluates the performance of a color constancy algorithm according to the perceptual preferences of humans, or naturalness (instead of the actual optimal solution) and is independent of the visual task. We show the results of a new psychophysical experiment comparing solutions from three different color constancy algorithms. Our results show that in more than a half of the judgments the preferred solution is not the one closest to the optimal solution. Our experiments were performed on a new dataset of images acquired with a calibrated camera with an attached neutral grey sphere, which better copes with the illuminant variations of the scene.

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.

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%.