507 research outputs found

    Stereo disparity improves color constancy

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    AbstractBinocular disparity is an aspect of natural viewing. This research investigates whether disparity affects surface color perception. Achromatic settings were obtained and compared for two stereograms of a scene with specular reflections, one stereogram with binocular disparity and one without it (cyclopean view). Binocular disparity was found to improve color constancy. Next, the geometry of specular highlights, which is distorted without binocular disparity, was specifically examined. Measurements compared color constancy with specular reflections that were either normal (with stereo disparity) or distorted (cyclopean view of the specularities). No significant change in constancy was found due to the geometrical distortion of specular highlights that occurs without stereo disparity, suggesting that constancy depends on other features of the percept affected by disparity. The results are discussed in terms of illuminant estimation in surface color perception

    Illuminant Estimation by Voting

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    Obtaining an estimate of the illuminant color is an important component in many image analysis applications. Due to the complexity of the problem many restrictive assumptions are commonly applied, making the existing illuminant estimation methodologies not widely applicable on natural images. We propose a methodology which analyzes a large number of regions in an image. An illuminant estimate is obtained independently from each region and a global illumination color is computed by consensus. Each region itself is mainly composed by pixels which simultaneously exhibit both diffuse and specular reflection. This allows for a larger inclusion of pixels than purely specularitybased methods, while avoiding, at the same time, some of the restrictive assumptions of purely diffuse-based approaches. As such, our technique is particularly well-suited for analyzing real-world images. Experiments with laboratory data show that our methodology outperforms 75 % of other illuminant estimation methods. On natural images, the algorithm is very stable and provides qualitatively correct estimates. 1

    Evaluation and optimal design of spectral sensitivities for digital color imaging

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    The quality of an image captured by color imaging system primarily depends on three factors: sensor spectral sensitivity, illumination and scene. While illumination is very important to be known, the sensitivity characteristics is critical to the success of imaging applications, and is necessary to be optimally designed under practical constraints. The ultimate image quality is judged subjectively by human visual system. This dissertation addresses the evaluation and optimal design of spectral sensitivity functions for digital color imaging devices. Color imaging fundamentals and device characterization are discussed in the first place. For the evaluation of spectral sensitivity functions, this dissertation concentrates on the consideration of imaging noise characteristics. Both signal-independent and signal-dependent noises form an imaging noise model and noises will be propagated while signal is processed. A new colorimetric quality metric, unified measure of goodness (UMG), which addresses color accuracy and noise performance simultaneously, is introduced and compared with other available quality metrics. Through comparison, UMG is designated as a primary evaluation metric. On the optimal design of spectral sensitivity functions, three generic approaches, optimization through enumeration evaluation, optimization of parameterized functions, and optimization of additional channel, are analyzed in the case of the filter fabrication process is unknown. Otherwise a hierarchical design approach is introduced, which emphasizes the use of the primary metric but the initial optimization results are refined through the application of multiple secondary metrics. Finally the validity of UMG as a primary metric and the hierarchical approach are experimentally tested and verified

    Outdoor computer vision and weed control

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    Integrating vision modules with coupled MRFs

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    A. I. Laboratory Working Papers are produced for internal circulation and contain proteins, lipids, cholesterol, polysorbate-80, and other compounds unsuitable for external exposure. It is not intended that material in this paper be applied externally; it is intended for internal consumption only. Serving suggestion: add taco sauce (not included).I outline a project for integrating several early visual modalities based on coupled Markov Random Fields models of the physical processes underlying image formation, such as depth, albedo and orientation of surfaces. The key ideas are: a) to use as input data estimates of the various processes and their discontinuities, computed by several different algorithms. b) to implement with MRFs the physical and geometrical constraints of local "continuity" of the processes and of their discontinuities. Processes are coupled to each other: the most common form of coupling is a veto — one process vetoing another — as in the case of discontinuities and the associated continuous field.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

    Time-lapse ratios of cone excitations in natural scenes

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    The illumination in natural environments varies through the day. Stable inferences about surface color might be supported by spatial ratios of cone excitations from the reflected light, but their invariance has been quantified only for global changes in illuminant spectrum. The aim here was to test their invariance under natural changes in both illumination spectrum and geometry, especially in the distribution of shadows. Time-lapse hyperspectral radiance images were acquired from five outdoor vegetated and nonvegetated scenes. From each scene, 10,000 pairs of points were sampled randomly and ratios measured across time. Mean relative deviations in ratios were generally large, but when sampling was limited to short distances or moderate time intervals, they fell below the level for detecting violations in ratio invariance. When illumination changes with uneven geometry were excluded, they fell further, to levels obtained with global changes in illuminant spectrum alone. Within sampling constraints, ratios of cone excitations, and also of opponent-color combinations, provide an approximately invariant signal for stable surface-color inferences, despite spectral and geometric variations in scene illumination.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, United Kingdom (Grant Nos. GR/R39412/01, EP/B000257/1, and EP/E056512/1). We thank Iván Marín-Franch for advice on statistical analysis and Oscar González for critical comments on the manuscript

    Estimation of illuminants from color signals of illuminated objects

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    Color constancy is the ability of the human visual systems to discount the effect of the illumination and to assign approximate constant color descriptions to objects. This ability has long been studied and widely applied to many areas such as color reproduction and machine vision, especially with the development of digital color processing. This thesis work makes some improvements in illuminant estimation and computational color constancy based on the study and testing of existing algorithms. During recent years, it has been noticed that illuminant estimation based on gamut comparison is efficient and simple to implement. Although numerous investigations have been done in this field, there are still some deficiencies. A large part of this thesis has been work in the area of illuminant estimation through gamut comparison. Noting the importance of color lightness in gamut comparison, and also in order to simplify three-dimensional gamut calculation, a new illuminant estimation method is proposed through gamut comparison at separated lightness levels. Maximum color separation is a color constancy method which is based on the assumption that colors in a scene will obtain the largest gamut area under white illumination. The method was further derived and improved in this thesis to make it applicable and efficient. In addition, some intrinsic questions in gamut comparison methods, for example the relationship between the color space and the application of gamut or probability distribution, were investigated. Color constancy methods through spectral recovery have the limitation that there is no effective way to confine the range of object spectral reflectance. In this thesis, a new constraint on spectral reflectance based on the relative ratios of the parameters from principal component analysis (PCA) decomposition is proposed. The proposed constraint was applied to illuminant detection methods as a metric on the recovered spectral reflectance. Because of the importance of the sensor sensitivities and their wide variation, the influence from the sensor sensitivities on different kinds of illuminant estimation methods was also studied. Estimation method stability to wrong sensor information was tested, suggesting the possible solution to illuminant estimation on images with unknown sources. In addition, with the development of multi-channel imaging, some research on illuminant estimation for multi-channel images both on the correlated color temperature (CCT) estimation and the illuminant spectral recovery was performed in this thesis. All the improvement and new proposed methods in this thesis are tested and compared with those existing methods with best performance, both on synthetic data and real images. The comparison verified the high efficiency and implementation simplicity of the proposed methods

    Illumination Invariant Outdoor Perception

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    This thesis proposes the use of a multi-modal sensor approach to achieve illumination invariance in images taken in outdoor environments. The approach is automatic in that it does not require user input for initialisation, and is not reliant on the input of atmospheric radiative transfer models. While it is common to use pixel colour and intensity as features in high level vision algorithms, their performance is severely limited by the uncontrolled lighting and complex geometric structure of outdoor scenes. The appearance of a material is dependent on the incident illumination, which can vary due to spatial and temporal factors. This variability causes identical materials to appear differently depending on their location. Illumination invariant representations of the scene can potentially improve the performance of high level vision algorithms as they allow discrimination between pixels to occur based on the underlying material characteristics. The proposed approach to obtaining illumination invariance utilises fused image and geometric data. An approximation of the outdoor illumination is used to derive per-pixel scaling factors. This has the effect of relighting the entire scene using a single illuminant that is common in terms of colour and intensity for all pixels. The approach is extended to radiometric normalisation and the multi-image scenario, meaning that the resultant dataset is both spatially and temporally illumination invariant. The proposed illumination invariance approach is evaluated on several datasets and shows that spatial and temporal invariance can be achieved without loss of spectral dimensionality. The system requires very few tuning parameters, meaning that expert knowledge is not required in order for its operation. This has potential implications for robotics and remote sensing applications where perception systems play an integral role in developing a rich understanding of the scene

    Computing von Kries Illuminant Changes by Piecewise Inversion of Cumulative Color Histograms

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    We present a linear algorithm for the computation of the illuminant change occurring between two color pictures of a scene. We model the light variations with the von Kries diagonal transform and we estimate it by minimizing a dissimilarity measure between the piecewise inversions of the cumulative color histograms of the considered images. We also propose a method for illuminant invariant image recognition based on our von Kries transform estimate
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