Enhancing spatio-chromatic representation with more-than-three color coding for image description

The extraction of spatio-chromatic features from color images is usually performed independently on each color channel. Usual 3D color spaces, such as RGB, present a high inter-channel correlation for natural images. This correlation can be reduced using color-opponent representations, but the spatial structure of regions with small color differences is not fully captured in two generic Red-Green and Blue-Yellow channels. To overcome these problems, we propose new color coding that is adapted to the specific content of each image. Our proposal is based on two steps: (a) setting the number of channels to the number of distinctive colors we find in each image (avoiding the problem of channel correlation), and (b) building a channel representation that maximizes contrast differences within each color channel (avoiding the problem of low local contrast). We call this approach more-than-three color coding (MTT) to emphasize the fact that the number of channels is adapted to the image content. The higher the color complexity of an image, the more channels can be used to represent it. Here we select distinctive colors as the most predominant in the image, which we call color pivots, and we build the new color coding strategy using these color pivots as a basis. To evaluate the proposed approach, we measure the efficiency in an image categorization task. We show how a generic descriptor improves performance at the description level when applied to the MTT coding

Depth Enhancement and Surface Reconstruction with RGB/D Sequence

Surface reconstruction and 3D modeling is a challenging task, which has been explored for decades by the computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning communities. It is fundamental to many applications such as robot navigation, animation and scene understanding, industrial control and medical diagnosis. In this dissertation, I take advantage of the consumer depth sensors for surface reconstruction. Considering its limited performance on capturing detailed surface geometry, a depth enhancement approach is proposed in the first place to recovery small and rich geometric details with captured depth and color sequence. In addition to enhancing its spatial resolution, I present a hybrid camera to improve the temporal resolution of consumer depth sensor and propose an optimization framework to capture high speed motion and generate high speed depth streams. Given the partial scans from the depth sensor, we also develop a novel fusion approach to build up complete and watertight human models with a template guided registration method. Finally, the problem of surface reconstruction for non-Lambertian objects, on which the current depth sensor fails, is addressed by exploiting multi-view images captured with a hand-held color camera and we propose a visual hull based approach to recovery the 3D model

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is a very wide research field. It involves factors as diverse as sensors, feature extraction, pattern classification, decision fusion, applications and others. The signals processed are commonly one, two or three dimensional, the processing is done in real- time or takes hours and days, some systems look for one narrow object class, others search huge databases for entries with at least a small amount of similarity. No single person can claim expertise across the whole field, which develops rapidly, updates its paradigms and comprehends several philosophical approaches. This book reflects this diversity by presenting a selection of recent developments within the area of pattern recognition and related fields. It covers theoretical advances in classification and feature extraction as well as application-oriented works. Authors of these 25 works present and advocate recent achievements of their research related to the field of pattern recognition