Illumination Invariant Outdoor Perception

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

Daylight: What Makes a Difference

Light is necessary for vision; it enables us to sense and perceive our surroundings and in many direct and indirect ways, via eye and skin, affects our physiological and psychological health. The use of light in built environments has comfort, behavioural, economic and environmental consequences. Daylight has many particular benefits including excellent visual performance, permitting good eyesight, effective entrainment of the circadian system as well as a number of acute non-image forming effects and the important role of vitamin D production. Some human responses to daylight seem to be well defined whilst others require more research to be adequately understood. This paper presents an overview of current knowledge on how the characteristics of daylight play a role in fulfilling these and other functions often better than electric lighting as conventionally delivered

Illumination Invariant Deep Learning for Hyperspectral Data

Motivated by the variability in hyperspectral images due to illumination and the difficulty in acquiring labelled data, this thesis proposes different approaches for learning illumination invariant feature representations and classification models for hyperspectral data captured outdoors, under natural sunlight. The approaches integrate domain knowledge into learning algorithms and hence does not rely on a priori knowledge of atmospheric parameters, additional sensors or large amounts of labelled training data. Hyperspectral sensors record rich semantic information from a scene, making them useful for robotics or remote sensing applications where perception systems are used to gain an understanding of the scene. Images recorded by hyperspectral sensors can, however, be affected to varying degrees by intrinsic factors relating to the sensor itself (keystone, smile, noise, particularly at the limits of the sensed spectral range) but also by extrinsic factors such as the way the scene is illuminated. The appearance of the scene in the image is tied to the incident illumination which is dependent on variables such as the position of the sun, geometry of the surface and the prevailing atmospheric conditions. Effects like shadows can make the appearance and spectral characteristics of identical materials to be significantly different. This degrades the performance of high-level algorithms that use hyperspectral data, such as those that do classification and clustering. If sufficient training data is available, learning algorithms such as neural networks can capture variability in the scene appearance and be trained to compensate for it. Learning algorithms are advantageous for this task because they do not require a priori knowledge of the prevailing atmospheric conditions or data from additional sensors. Labelling of hyperspectral data is, however, difficult and time-consuming, so acquiring enough labelled samples for the learning algorithm to adequately capture the scene appearance is challenging. Hence, there is a need for the development of techniques that are invariant to the effects of illumination that do not require large amounts of labelled data. In this thesis, an approach to learning a representation of hyperspectral data that is invariant to the effects of illumination is proposed. This approach combines a physics-based model of the illumination process with an unsupervised deep learning algorithm, and thus requires no labelled data. Datasets that vary both temporally and spatially are used to compare the proposed approach to other similar state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that the learnt representation is more invariant to shadows in the image and to variations in brightness due to changes in the scene topography or position of the sun in the sky. The results also show that a supervised classifier can predict class labels more accurately and more consistently across time when images are represented using the proposed method. Additionally, this thesis proposes methods to train supervised classification models to be more robust to variations in illumination where only limited amounts of labelled data are available. The transfer of knowledge from well-labelled datasets to poorly labelled datasets for classification is investigated. A method is also proposed for enabling small amounts of labelled samples to capture the variability in spectra across the scene. These samples are then used to train a classifier to be robust to the variability in the data caused by variations in illumination. The results show that these approaches make convolutional neural network classifiers more robust and achieve better performance when there is limited labelled training data. A case study is presented where a pipeline is proposed that incorporates the methods proposed in this thesis for learning robust feature representations and classification models. A scene is clustered using no labelled data. The results show that the pipeline groups the data into clusters that are consistent with the spatial distribution of the classes in the scene as determined from ground truth

Night rendering

Journal ArticleThe issues of realistically rendering naturally illuminated scenes at night are examined. This requires accurate models for moonlight, night skylight, and starlight. In addition, several issues in tone reproduction are discussed: eliminatiing high frequency information invisible to scotopic (night vision) observers; representing the flare lines around stars; determining the dominant hue for the displayed image. The lighting and tone reproduction are shown on a variety of models

Quantifying spatial, temporal, angular and spectral structure of effective daylight in perceptually meaningful ways

We present a method to capture the 7-dimensional light field structure, and translate it into perceptually-relevant information. Our spectral cubic illumination method quantifies objective correlates of perceptually relevant diffuse and directed light components, including their variations over time, space, in color and direction, and the environment's response to sky and sunlight. We applied it 'in the wild', capturing how light on a sunny day differs between light and shadow, and how light varies over sunny and cloudy days. We discuss the added value of our method for capturing nuanced lighting effects on scene and object appearance, such as chromatic gradients