Abstract: The perceived colour of a stimulus is dependent on multiple factors stemming out either from the context of the stimulus or idiosyncrasies of the observer. The complexity involved in combining these multiple effects is the main reason for the gap between classical calibrated colour spaces from colour science and colour representations used in computer vision, where colour is just one more visual cue immersed in a digital image where surfaces, shadows and illuminants interact seemingly out of control. With the aim to advance a few steps towards bridging this gap we present some results on computational representations of colour for computer vision. They have been developed by introducing perceptual considerations derived from the interaction of the colour of a point with its context. We show some techniques to represent the colour of a point influenced by assimilation and contrast effects due to the image surround and we show some results on how colour saliency can be derived in real images. We outline a model for automatic assignment of colour names to image points directly trained on psychophysical data. We show how colour segments can be perceptually grouped in the image by imposing shading coherence in the colour space.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel technique to detect the shadows cast by urban infrastructure, such as buildings, billboards, and traffic signs, using a sequence of images taken from a fixed camera. In our approach, we compute two different background models in parallel: one for the edges and one for the reflected light intensity. An algorithm is proposed to train the system to distinguish between moving edges in general and edges that belong to static objects, creating an edge background model. Then, during operation, a background intensity model allow us to separate between moving and static objects. Those edges included in the moving objects and those that belong to the edge background model are subtracted from the current image edges. The remaining edges are the ones cast by urban infrastructure. Our method is tested on a typical crossroad scene and the results show that the approach is sound and promising.

Abstract: We present a new method for explicit graph embedding. Our algorithm extracts a feature vector for an undirected attributed graph. The proposed feature vector encodes details about the number of nodes, number of edges, node degrees, the attributes of nodes and the attributes of edges in the graph. The first two features are for the number of nodes and the number of edges. These are followed by w features for node degrees, m features for k node attributes and n features for l edge attributes — which represent the distribution of node degrees, node attribute values and edge attribute values, and are obtained by defining (in an unsupervised fashion), fuzzy-intervals over the list of node degrees, node attributes and edge attributes. Experimental results are provided for sample data of ICPR2010 contest GEPR.

Abstract: Cascading techniques are commonly used to speed-up the scan of an image for object detection. However, cascades of detectors are slow to train due to the high number of detectors and corresponding thresholds to learn. Furthermore, they do not use any prior knowledge about the scene structure to decide where to focus the search. To handle these problems, we propose a new way to scan an image, where we couple a recursive coarse-to-fine refinement together with spatial constraints of the object location. For doing that we split an image into a set of uniformly distributed neighborhood regions, and for each of these we apply a local greedy search over feature resolutions. The neighborhood is defined as a scanning region that only one object can occupy. Therefore the best hypothesis is obtained as the location with maximum score and no thresholds are needed. We present an implementation of our method using a pyramid of HOG features and we evaluate it on two standard databases, VOC2007 and INRIA dataset. Results show that the Recursive Coarse-to-Fine Localization (RCFL) achieves a 12x speed-up compared to standard sliding windows. Compared with a cascade of multiple resolutions approach our method has slightly better performance in speed and Average-Precision. Furthermore, in contrast to cascading approach, the speed-up is independent of image conditions, the number of detected objects and clutter.

Abstract: Although graph embedding has recently been used to extend statistical pattern recognition techniques to the graph domain, some existing embeddings are usually computationally expensive as they rely on classical graph-based operations. In this paper we present a new way to embed graphs into vector spaces by first encapsulating the information stored in the original graph under another graph representation by clustering the attributes of the graphs to be processed. This new representation makes the association of graphs to vectors an easy step by just arranging both node attributes and the adjacency matrix in the form of vectors. To test our method, we use two different databases of graphs whose nodes attributes are of different nature. A comparison with a reference method permits to show that this new embedding is better in terms of classification rates, while being much more faster.

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: In this paper we evaluate four graph distance measures. The analysis is performed for document retrieval tasks. For this aim, different kind of documents are used including line drawings (symbols), ancient documents (ornamental letters), shapes and trademark-logos. The experimental results show that the performance of each graph distance measure depends on the kind of data and the graph representation technique.