Relational color constancy in achromatic and isoluminant images

Relational color constancy, which refers to the constancy of perceived relations between surface colors under changes in illuminant, may be based on the computation of spatial ratios of cone excitations. As this activity need occur only within rather than between cone pathways, relational color constancy might be assumed to be based on relative luminance processing. This hypothesis was tested in a psychophysical experiment in which observers viewed simulated images of Mondrian patterns undergoing colorimetric changes that could be attributed either to an illuminant change or to a nonilluminant change; the images were isoluminant, achromatic, or unmodified. Observers reliably discriminated the two types of changes in all three conditions, implying that relational color constancy is not based on luminance cues alone. A computer simulation showed that in these isoluminant and achromatic images spatial ratios of cone excitations and of combinations of cone excitations were almost invariant under illuminant changes and that discrimination performance could be predicted from deviations in these ratios.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC

Evaluation and improvement of the workflow of digital imaging of fine art reproduction in museums

Fine arts refer to a broad spectrum of art formats, ie~painting, calligraphy, photography, architecture, and so forth. Fine art reproductions are to create surrogates of the original artwork that are able to faithfully deliver the aesthetics and feelings of the original. Traditionally, reproductions of fine art are made in the form of catalogs, postcards or books by museums, libraries, archives, and so on (hereafter called museums for simplicity). With the widespread adoption of digital archiving in museums, more and more artwork is reproduced to be viewed on a display. For example, artwork collections are made available through museum websites and Google Art Project for art lovers to view on their own displays. In the thesis, we study the fine art reproduction of paintings in the form of soft copy viewed on displays by answering four questions: (1) what is the impact of the viewing condition and original on image quality evaluation? (2) can image quality be improved by avoiding visual editing in current workflows of fine art reproduction? (3) can lightweight spectral imaging be used for fine art reproduction? and (4) what is the performance of spectral reproductions compared with reproductions by current workflows? We started with evaluating the perceived image quality of fine art reproduction created by representative museums in the United States under controlled and uncontrolled environments with and without the presence of the original artwork. The experimental results suggest that the image quality is highly correlated with the color accuracy of the reproduction only when the original is present and the reproduction is evaluated on a characterized display. We then examined the workflows to create these reproductions, and found that current workflows rely heavily on visual editing and retouching (global and local color adjustments on the digital reproduction) to improve the color accuracy of the reproduction. Visual editing and retouching can be both time-consuming and subjective in nature (depending on experts\u27 own experience and understanding of the artwork) lowering the efficiency of artwork digitization considerably. We therefore propose to improve the workflow of fine art reproduction by (1) automating the process of visual editing and retouching in current workflows based on RGB acquisition systems and by (2) recovering the spectral reflectance of the painting with off-the-shelf equipment under commonly available lighting conditions. Finally, we studied the perceived image quality of reproductions created by current three-channel (RGB) workflows with those by spectral imaging and those based on an exemplar-based method

Estimation of illuminants from color signals of illuminated objects

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

Determinants of colour constancy

Colour constancy describes the ability of our visual system to keep colour percepts stable through illumination changes. This is an outstanding feat given that in the retinal image surface and illuminant properties are conflated. Still, in our everyday lives we are able attribute stable colour-labels to objects to make communication economic and efficient. Past research shows colour constancy to be imperfect, compensating for 40% and 80% of the illumination change. While different constancy determinants are suggested, no carefully controlled study shows perfect constancy. The first study presented here addresses the issue of imperfect constancy by investigating colour constancy in a cue rich environment, using a task that resembles our everyday experience with colours. Participants were asked to recall the colour of unique personal objects in natural environment under four chromatic illuminations. This approach yielded perfect colour constancy. The second study investigated the relation between illumination discrimination and chromatic detection. Recent studies using an illumination discrimination paradigm suggest that colour constancy is optimized for bluish daylight illuminations. Because it is not clear if illumination discrimination is directly related to colour constancy or is instead explained by sensitivity to changes in chromaticity of different hues, thresholds for illumination discrimination and chromatic detection for the same 12 illumination hues were compared. While the reported blue bias could be replicated, thresholds for illumination discrimination and chromatic detection were highly related, indicating that lower sensibility towards bluish hues is not exclusive to illumination discrimination. Accompanying the second study, the third study investigated the distribution of colour constancy for 40 chromatic illuminations of different hue using achromatic adjustments and colour naming. These measurements were compared to several determinants of colour constancy, including the daylight locus, colour categories, illumination discrimination, chromatic detection, relational colour constancy and metameric mismatching. In accordance with the observations in study 2, achromatic adjustments revealed a bias towards bluish daylight illumination. This blue bias and naming consistency explained most of the variance in achromatic adjustments, while illumination discrimination was not directly related to colour constancy. The fourth study examined colour memory biases. Past research shows that colours of objects are remembered as being more saturated than they are perceived. These works often used natural objects that exist in a variety of colour and hue, such as grass or bananas. The approach presented here directly compared perceived and memorized colours for unique objects, used also in the first study, and confirmed the previous findings that on average, objects were remembered more saturated than they were perceived.Farbkonstanz beschreibt die Fähigkeit unseres visuellen Systems Farbeindrücke unter Beleuchtungsänderungen beständig zu halten. Dies ist eine außergewöhnliche Leistung, wenn man in Betracht zieht, dass in dem Lichtsignal welches das Auge erreicht Eigenschaften der Beleuchtung und der Oberflächen konfundiert sind. Trotz dieser Problematik sind wir in unserem alltäglichen Leben in der Lage Objekten stabile Farbnamen zuzuordnen, und damit unsere Kommunikation effizient und ökonomisch zu gestalten. Bisherige Studien zur Farbkonstanz berichten jedoch, dass Farbkonstanz nicht perfekt ist, Beleuchtungswechsel wurden nur zwischen 40-80% kompensiert. Während unterschiedliche Determinanten der Farbkonstanz vorgeschlagen wurden, konnte bisher keine sorgfältig kontrollierte Studie perfekte Farbkonstanz zeigen. In der ersten Studie dieser Arbeit wurde dieser Aspekt untersucht, indem Farbkonstanz in einer hinweisreichen Umgebung unter Verwendung einer Aufgabe, die möglichst präzise unserer alltäglichen Erfahrung im Umgang mit Farben wiederspiegelt, gemessen wurde. Die Versuchsteilnehmer wurden aufgefordert die Farbe eines spezifischen persönlichen Gegenstandes unter vier farbigen Beleuchtungen aus dem Gedächtnis abzurufen. Unter Verwendung dieses Ansatzes konnte perfekte Farbkonstanz erreicht werden. Die zweite Studie untersuchte die Beziehung zwischen Beleuchtungs-Diskrimination und chromatischer Detektion. Die Ergebnisse von kürzlich veröffentlichten Forschungsarbeiten, welche ein Beleuchtungs-Diskriminations-Paradigma verwendeten, zeigen das diese Diskrimination in Richtung bläulicher Beleuchtung verzerrt ist. Daraus wurde geschlossen, das Farbkonstanz für bläuliche Tageslicht-Beleuchtungen optimiert ist . Da es aber nicht klar ist, ob Beleuchtungs-Diskrimination in direkter Beziehung zur Farbkonstanz steht, oder aber vielmehr auf die Sensitivität für chromatische Veränderungen zurückführen ist, wurden Wahrnehmungsschwellen für Beleuchtungs-Diskrimination und chromatische Detektion für die selben 12 Beleuchtungsfarben gemessen und verglichen. Während die bereits berichtete Verzerrung in Richtung der bläulichen Tageslichtbeleuchtung repliziert werden konnte, wurde ebenfalls eine hoher Zusammenhang zwischen chromatischer Detektion und Beleuchtungs-Diskrimination gefunden, welcher darauf hinweist, dass die Verzerrung in Richtung bläulicher Farben keine exklusive Eigenschaft der Beleuchtung-Diskrimination ist. Anknüpfend an die zweite Studie wurde in der dritten Studie die Verteilung von Farbkonstanz über 40 chromatische Beleuchtungen anhand von achromatischen Einstellungen und Farbbenennung untersucht. Farbkonstanz wurde auf ihren Zusammenhang zu mehreren Determinanten der Farbkonstanz überprüft, unter anderem mit Tageslichtvariationen, Farbkategorien, Beleuchtungs-Diskrimination, relationaler Farbkonstanz und metameric mismatching. In Übereinstimmung mit der zweiten Studie wurde auch für achromatische Einstellungen eine Verzerrung in Richtung bläulicher Tageslichtbeleuchtungen gefunden. Diese Verzerrung und der Konsensus der Beleuchtungsbenennung erklärten den Großteil der Varianz der achromatischen Einstellungen, während Beleuchtungs-Diskrimination nicht in direkter Verbindung zur Farbkonstanz stand. In der vierten Studie wurden Verzerrungen des Farbgedächtnisses untersucht. Frühere Studien berichten, dass Objektfarben häufig gesättigter erinnert werden als sie tatsächlich wahrgenommen werden. In diesen Studien wurden häufig natürliche Objekte verwendet, die in einer Vielzahl an Farbtönen und Sättigungen existieren, wie beispielsweise Gras oder Bananen. In dem hier präsentierten Ansatz wurden Farbwahlen aus dem Gedächtnis mit Farbwahlen der direkten Objektwahrnehmung für persönliche, spezifische Objekte, die auch schon in der ersten Studie verwendet wurden, verglichen. Die Ergebnisse der vorherigen Studien konnten für diese Objekte repliziert werden: Im Durchschnitt wurden Objektfarben gesättigter erinnert als das Objekt im direkten Vergleich wahrgenommen wurde

Energy optimization of a light projection system for buildings that virtually restores artworks

Published March 2022: Erratum regarding missing Declaration of Competing Interest statements in previously published articles - Part 1 (Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Volume 24, March 2022, Pages e00209). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.daach.2021.e00209; Erratum incluido en el documentoThe need to achieve energy efficiency standards in the lighting systems of buildings makes it necessary to optimize all aspects of them. Here, the development of a light projection system that achieves this goal by studyingand modifying the spectral output, compared to conventional illumination, is described. A lighting system thatestimates the reflectance characteristics of artwork and emits optimized lighting can reduce light absorption. Adamage-minimizing point-by-point light projection system is developed using an optimization algorithm, toimprove the appearance of the surfaces of artworks whose color has faded. In this case, a simulation of an aged oilpainting was made by manipulating the original photograph, which was printed and to which the proposedsystem was applied. The results show that, when the aged printed image is illuminated with the optimized lightsource, it appears indistinguishable from the non-aged oil painting.This research was supported by project RTI2018-097633-A-I00 from the Spanish Ministry funding "Proyectos I + D Retos de Investigación" entitled Photonic restoration applied to cultural heritage: application to Dali's picture "Dos Figuras

The Hyper-log-chromaticity space for illuminant invariance

Variation in illumination conditions through a scene is a common issue for classification, segmentation and recognition applications. Traffic monitoring and driver assistance systems have difficulty with the changing illumination conditions at night, throughout the day, with multiple sources (especially at night) and in the presence of shadows. The majority of existing algorithms for color constancy or shadow detection rely on multiple frames for comparison or to build a background model. The proposed approach uses a novel color space inspired by the Log-Chromaticity space and modifies the bilateral filter to equalize illumination across objects using a single frame. Neighboring pixels of the same color, but of different brightness, are assumed to be of the same object/material. The utility of the algorithm is studied over day and night simulated scenes of varying complexity. The objective is not to provide a product for visual inspection but rather an alternate image with fewer illumination related issues for other algorithms to process. The usefulness of the filter is demonstrated by applying two simple classifiers and comparing the class statistics. The hyper-log-chromaticity image and the filtered image both improve the quality of the classification relative to the un-processed image

Hyperspectral Data Acquisition and Its Application for Face Recognition

Current face recognition systems are rife with serious challenges in uncontrolled conditions: e.g., unrestrained lighting, pose variations, accessories, etc. Hyperspectral imaging (HI) is typically employed to counter many of those challenges, by incorporating the spectral information within different bands. Although numerous methods based on hyperspectral imaging have been developed for face recognition with promising results, three fundamental challenges remain: 1) low signal to noise ratios and low intensity values in the bands of the hyperspectral image specifically near blue bands; 2) high dimensionality of hyperspectral data; and 3) inter-band misalignment (IBM) correlated with subject motion during data acquisition. This dissertation concentrates mainly on addressing the aforementioned challenges in HI. First, to address low quality of the bands of the hyperspectral image, we utilize a custom light source that has more radiant power at shorter wavelengths and properly adjust camera exposure times corresponding to lower transmittance of the filter and lower radiant power of our light source. Second, the high dimensionality of spectral data imposes limitations on numerical analysis. As such, there is an emerging demand for robust data compression techniques with lows of less relevant information to manage real spectral data. To cope with these challenging problems, we describe a reduced-order data modeling technique based on local proper orthogonal decomposition in order to compute low-dimensional models by projecting high-dimensional clusters onto subspaces spanned by local reduced-order bases. Third, we investigate 11 leading alignment approaches to address IBM correlated with subject motion during data acquisition. To overcome the limitations of the considered alignment approaches, we propose an accurate alignment approach ( A3) by incorporating the strengths of point correspondence and a low-rank model. In addition, we develop two qualitative prediction models to assess the alignment quality of hyperspectral images in determining improved alignment among the conducted alignment approaches. Finally, we show that the proposed alignment approach leads to promising improvement on face recognition performance of a probabilistic linear discriminant analysis approach

Optimising Light Source Spectrum to Reduce the Energy Absorbed by Objects

Light is used to illuminate objects in the built environment. Humans can only observe light reflected from an object. Light absorbed by an object turns into heat and does not contribute to visibility. Since the spectral output of the new lighting technologies can be tuned, it is possible to imagine a lighting system that detects the colours of objects and emits customised light to minimise the absorbed energy. Previous optimisation studies investigated the use of narrowband LEDs to maximise the efficiency and colour quality of a light source. While these studies aimed to tune a white light source for general use, the lighting system proposed here minimises the energy consumed by lighting by detecting colours of objects and emitting customised light onto each coloured part of the object. This thesis investigates the feasibility of absorption-minimising light source spectra and their impact on the colour appearance of objects and energy consumption. Two computational studies were undertaken to form the theoretical basis of the absorption-minimising light source spectra. Computational simulations show that the theoretical single-peak spectra can lower the energy consumption up to around 38 % to 62 %, and double-peak test spectra can result in energy savings up to 71 %, without causing colour shifts. In these studies, standard reference illuminants, theoretical test spectra and coloured test samples were used. These studies are followed by the empirical evidence collected from two psychophysical experiments. Data from the experiments show that observers find the colour appearance of objects equally natural and attractive under spectrally optimised spectra and reference white light sources. An increased colour difference, to a certain extent, is found acceptable, which allows even higher energy savings. However, the translucent nature of some objects may negatively affect the results