We address the problem of decomposing a single image into reflectance and shading. The difficulty comes from the fact that the components of image---the surface albedo, the direct illumination, and the ambient illumination---are coupled heavily in observed image. We propose to infer the shading by ordering pixels by their relative brightness, without knowing the absolute values of the image components beforehand. The pairwise shading orders are estimated in two ways: brightness order and low-order fittings of local shading field. The brightness order is a non-local measure, which can be applied to any pair of pixels including those whose reflectance and shading are both different. The low-order fittings are used for pixel pairs within local regions of smooth shading. Together, they can capture both global order structure and local variations of the shading. We propose a Consistency-aware Selective Fusion (CSF) to integrate the pairwise orders into a globally consistent order. The iterative selection process solves the conflicts between the pairwise orders obtained by different estimation methods. Inconsistent or unreliable pairwise orders will be automatically excluded from the fusion to avoid polluting the global order. Experiments on the MIT Intrinsic Image dataset show that the proposed model is effective at recovering the shading including deep shadows. Our model also works well on natural images from the IIW dataset, the UIUC Shadow dataset and the NYU-Depth dataset, where the colors of direct lights and ambient lights are quite different.
Different constraints often result in quite different shading orders. How to fuse them remains an open problem. Edge-based methods classify each edge into a reflectance edge or a shading edge. Accordingly, the shading order between the two sides of the edge can be decided. In particular, Retinex classified the edges by the magnitude of gradients @cite_44 . This classification method is risky. Some shadow edges are quite strong, while the reflectance edges between similar colors are relatively weak. Extensions of Retinex introduced several new features, including texture similarity @cite_15 , classifiers over local features @cite_46 or patches @cite_17 @cite_11 , correlation between the mean luminance and luminance amplitude @cite_41 , and image sequences under different illumination directions @cite_49 @cite_22 . These features improved the accuracy of classification, but none of them are robust enough to handle all kinds of scenes. CSF faces a similar problem of selecting the optimal pairwise order from several estimates. The difference is that CSF incorporates consistency between the pairwise orders and global order into the selection criteria, which can rectify the inconsistent selections made by noisy image features.
@cite_22 @cite_46 @cite_41 @cite_17 @cite_44 @cite_49 @cite_15 @cite_11
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Retinex theory deals with the removal of unfavorable illumination effects from images. This ill-posed inverse problem is typically regularized by forcing spatial smoothness on the recoverable illumination. Recent work in this field suggested exploiting the knowledge that the illumination image bounds the image from above, and the fact that the reflectance is also expected to be smooth. In this paper we show how the above model can be improved to provide a non-iterative retinex algorithm that handles better edges in the illumination, and suppresses noise in dark areas. This algorithm uses two specially tailored bilateral filters – the first evaluates the illumination and the other is used for the computation of the reflectance. This result stands as a theoretic justification and refinement for the recently proposed heuristic use of the bilateral filter for retinex by Durand and Dorsey. In line with their appealing way of speeding up the bilateral filter, we show that similar speedup methods apply to our algorithm. We propose a method for intrinsic image decomposition based on retinex theory and texture analysis. While most previous methods approach this problem by analyzing local gradient properties, our technique additionally identifies distant pixels with the same reflectance through texture analysis, and uses these nonlocal reflectance constraints to significantly reduce ambiguity in decomposition. We formulate the decomposition problem as the minimization of a quadratic function which incorporates both the retinex constraint and our nonlocal texture constraint. This optimization can be solved in closed form with the standard conjugate gradient algorithm. Extensive experimentation with comparisons to previous techniques validate our method in terms of both decomposition accuracy and runtime efficiency. The paper studies the problem of combining region and boundary cues for natural image segmentation. We employ a large database of manually segmented images in order to learn an optimal affinity function between pairs of pixels. These pairwise affinities can then be used to cluster the pixels into visually coherent groups. Region cues are computed as the similarity in brightness, color, and texture between image patches. Boundary cues are incorporated by looking for the presence of an "intervening contour", a large gradient along a straight line connecting two pixels. We first use the dataset of human segmentations to individually optimize parameters of the patch and gradient features for brightness, color, and texture cues. We then quantitatively measure the power of different feature combinations by computing the precision and recall of classifiers trained using those features. The mutual information between the output of the classifiers and the same-segment indicator function provides an alternative evaluation technique that yields identical conclusions. As expected, the best classifier makes use of brightness, color, and texture features, in both patch and gradient forms. We find that for brightness, the gradient cue outperforms the patch similarity. In contrast, using color patch similarity yields better results than using color gradients. Texture is the most powerful of the three channels, with both patches and gradients carrying significant independent information. Interestingly, the proximity of the two pixels does not add any information beyond that provided by the similarity cues. We also find that the convexity assumptions made by the intervening contour approach are supported by the ecological statistics of the dataset. In this paper, we introduce new edge-based features for the task of recovering the 3D layout of an indoor scene from a single image. Indoor scenes have certain edges that are very informative about the spatial layout of the room, namely, the edges formed by the pairwise intersections of room faces (two walls, wall and ceiling, wall and floor). In contrast with previous approaches that rely on area-based features like geometric context and orientation maps, our method attempts to directly detect these informative edges. We learn to predict 'informative edge' probability maps using two recent methods that exploit local and global context, respectively: structured edge detection forests, and a fully convolutional network for pixelwise labeling. We show that the fully convolutional network is quite successful at predicting the informative edges even when they lack contrast or are occluded, and that the accuracy can be further improved by training the network to jointly predict the edges and the geometric context. Using features derived from the 'informative edge' maps, we learn a maximum margin structured classifier that achieves state-of-the-art performance on layout prediction. This paper proposes a novel approach to extract image features for texture classification. The proposed features are robust to image rotation, less sensitive to histogram equalization and noise. It comprises of two sets of features: dominant local binary patterns (DLBP) in a texture image and the supplementary features extracted by using the circularly symmetric Gabor filter responses. The dominant local binary pattern method makes use of the most frequently occurred patterns to capture descriptive textural information, while the Gabor-based features aim at supplying additional global textural information to the DLBP features. Through experiments, the proposed approach has been intensively evaluated by applying a large number of classification tests to histogram-equalized, randomly rotated and noise corrupted images in Outex, Brodatz, Meastex, and CUReT texture image databases. Our method has also been compared with six published texture features in the experiments. It is experimentally demonstrated that the proposed method achieves the highest classification accuracy in various texture databases and image conditions. Decomposing an input image into its intrinsic shading and reflectance components is a long-standing ill-posed problem. We present a novel algorithm that requires no user strokes and works on a single image. Based on simple assumptions about its reflectance and luminance, we first find clusters of similar reflectance in the image, and build a linear system describing the connections and relations between them. Our assumptions are less restrictive than widely-adopted Retinex-based approaches, and can be further relaxed in conflicting situations. The resulting system is robust even in the presence of areas where our assumptions do not hold. We show a wide variety of results, including natural images, objects from the MIT dataset and texture images, along with several applications, proving the versatility of our method. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. A luminance based multi scale retinex (LB spl I.bar MSR) algorithm for the enhancement of darker images is proposed in this paper. The new technique consists only the addition of the convolution results of 3 different scales. In this way, the color noise in the shadow dark areas can be suppressed and the convolutions with different scales can be calculated simultaneously to save CPU time. Color saturation adjustment for producing more natural colors is implemented. Each spectral band can be adjusted based on the enhancement of the intensity of the band and by using a color saturation parameter. The color saturation degree can be automatically adjusted according to different types of images by compensating the original color saturation in each band. Luminance control is applied to prevent the unwanted luminance drop at the uniform luminance areas by automatically detecting the luminance drop and keeping the luminance up to certain level that is evaluated from the original image. Down-sized convolution is used for fast processing and then the result is re-sized back to the original size. Performance of the new enhancement algorithm is tested in various images captured at different lighting conditions. It is observed that the new technique outperforms the conventional MSR technique in terms of the quality of the enhanced images and computational speed. Direct observation and recorded color images of the same scenes are often strikingly different because human visual perception computes the conscious representation with vivid color and detail in shadows, and with resistance to spectral shifts in the scene illuminant. A computation for color images that approaches fidelity to scene observation must combine dynamic range compression, color consistency-a computational analog for human vision color constancy-and color and lightness tonal rendition. In this paper, we extend a previously designed single-scale center surround retinex to a multiscale version that achieves simultaneous dynamic range compression color consistency lightness rendition. This extension fails to produce good color rendition for a class of images that contain violations of the gray-world assumption implicit to the theoretical foundation of the retinex. Therefore, we define a method of color restoration that corrects for this deficiency at the cost of a modest dilution in color consistency. Extensive testing of the multiscale retinex with color restoration on several test scenes and over a hundred images did not reveal any pathological behaviour. This paper presents a low-light image enhancement method using the variational-optimization-based Retinex algorithm. The proposed enhancement method first estimates the initial illumination and uses its gamma corrected version to constrain the illumination component. Next, the variational-based minimization is iteratively performed to separate the reflectance and illumination components. The color assignment of the estimated reflectance component is then performed to restore the color component using the input RGB color channels. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide better enhanced result without saturation, noise amplification or color distortion. This paper provides an algorithm for partitioning grayscale images into disjoint regions of coherent brightness and texture. Natural images contain both textured and untextured regions, so the cues of contour and texture differences are exploited simultaneously. Contours are treated in the intervening contour framework, while texture is analyzed using textons. Each of these cues has a domain of applicability, so to facilitate cue combination we introduce a gating operator based on the texturedness of the neighborhood at a pixel. Having obtained a local measure of how likely two nearby pixels are to belong to the same region, we use the spectral graph theoretic framework of normalized cuts to find partitions of the image into regions of coherent texture and brightness. Experimental results on a wide range of images are shown. Image enhancement plays an important role in image processing and analysis. Among various enhancement algorithms, Retinex-based algorithms can efficiently enhance details and have been widely adopted. Since Retinex-based algorithms regard illumination removal as a default preference and fail to limit the range of reflectance, the naturalness of non-uniform illumination images cannot be effectively preserved. However, naturalness is essential for image enhancement to achieve pleasing perceptual quality. In order to preserve naturalness while enhancing details, we propose an enhancement algorithm for non-uniform illumination images. In general, this paper makes the following three major contributions. First, a lightness-order-error measure is proposed to access naturalness preservation objectively. Second, a bright-pass filter is proposed to decompose an image into reflectance and illumination, which, respectively, determine the details and the naturalness of the image. Third, we propose a bi-log transformation, which is utilized to map the illumination to make a balance between details and naturalness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can not only enhance the details but also preserve the naturalness for non-uniform illumination images. Color equalization algorithms exhibit a variety of behaviors described in two differing types of models: Gray World and White Patch. These two models are considered alternatives to each other in methods of color correction. They are the basis for two human visual adaptation mechanisms: Lightness Constancy and Color Constancy. The Gray World approach is typical of the Lightness Constancy adaptation because it centers the histogram dynamic, working the same way as the exposure control on a camera. Alternatively, the White Patch approach is typical of the Color Constancy adaptation, searching for the lightest patch to use as a white reference similar to how the human visual system does. The Retinex algorithm basically belongs to the White Patch family due to its reset mechanism. Searching for a way to merge these two approaches, we have developed a new chromatic correction algorithm, called Automatic Color Equalization (ACE), which is able to perform Color Constancy even if based on Gray World approach. It maintains the main Retinex idea that the color sensation derives from the comparison of the spectral lightness values across the image. We tested different performance measures on ACE, Retinex and other equalization algorithms. The results of this comparison are presented.© (2002) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only. We present a novel method to obtain fine-scale detail in 3D reconstructions generated with low-budget RGB-D cameras or other commodity scanning devices. As the depth data of these sensors is noisy, truncated signed distance fields are typically used to regularize out the noise, which unfortunately leads to over-smoothed results. In our approach, we leverage RGB data to refine these reconstructions through shading cues, as color input is typically of much higher resolution than the depth data. As a result, we obtain reconstructions with high geometric detail, far beyond the depth resolution of the camera itself. Our core contribution is shading-based refinement directly on the implicit surface representation, which is generated from globally-aligned RGB-D images. We formulate the inverse shading problem on the volumetric distance field, and present a novel objective function which jointly optimizes for fine-scale surface geometry and spatially-varying surface reflectance. In order to enable the efficient reconstruction of sub-millimeter detail, we store and process our surface using a sparse voxel hashing scheme which we augment by introducing a grid hierarchy. A tailored GPU-based Gauss-Newton solver enables us to refine large shape models to previously unseen resolution within only a few seconds. If a physical object has a smooth or piecewise smooth boundary, its images obtained by cameras in varying positions undergo smooth apparent deformations. These deformations are locally well approximated by affine transforms of the image plane. In consequence the solid object recognition problem has often been led back to the computation of affine invariant image local features. Such invariant features could be obtained by normalization methods, but no fully affine normalization method exists for the time being. Even scale invariance is dealt with rigorously only by the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) method. By simulating zooms out and normalizing translation and rotation, SIFT is invariant to four out of the six parameters of an affine transform. The method proposed in this paper, affine-SIFT (ASIFT), simulates all image views obtainable by varying the two camera axis orientation parameters, namely, the latitude and the longitude angles, left over by the SIFT method. Then it covers the other four parameters by using the SIFT method itself. The resulting method will be mathematically proved to be fully affine invariant. Against any prognosis, simulating all views depending on the two camera orientation parameters is feasible with no dramatic computational load. A two-resolution scheme further reduces the ASIFT complexity to about twice that of SIFT. A new notion, the transition tilt, measuring the amount of distortion from one view to another, is introduced. While an absolute tilt from a frontal to a slanted view exceeding 6 is rare, much higher transition tilts are common when two slanted views of an object are compared (see Figure hightransitiontiltsillustration). The attainable transition tilt is measured for each affine image comparison method. The new method permits one to reliably identify features that have undergone transition tilts of large magnitude, up to 36 and higher. This fact is substantiated by many experiments which show that ASIFT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods SIFT, maximally stable extremal region (MSER), Harris-affine, and Hessian-affine. Recently, a method for removing shadows from colour images was developed ( in IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 28:59---68, 2006) that relies upon finding a special direction in a 2D chromaticity feature space. This "invariant direction" is that for which particular colour features, when projected into 1D, produce a greyscale image which is approximately invariant to intensity and colour of scene illumination. Thus shadows, which are in essence a particular type of lighting, are greatly attenuated. The main approach to finding this special angle is a camera calibration: a colour target is imaged under many different lights, and the direction that best makes colour patch images equal across illuminants is the invariant direction. Here, we take a different approach. In this work, instead of a camera calibration we aim at finding the invariant direction from evidence in the colour image itself. Specifically, we recognize that producing a 1D projection in the correct invariant direction will result in a 1D distribution of pixel values that have smaller entropy than projecting in the wrong direction. The reason is that the correct projection results in a probability distribution spike, for pixels all the same except differing by the lighting that produced their observed RGB values and therefore lying along a line with orientation equal to the invariant direction. Hence we seek that projection which produces a type of intrinsic, independent of lighting reflectance-information only image by minimizing entropy, and from there go on to remove shadows as previously. To be able to develop an effective description of the entropy-minimization task, we go over to the quadratic entropy, rather than Shannon's definition. Replacing the observed pixels with a kernel density probability distribution, the quadratic entropy can be written as a very simple formulation, and can be evaluated using the efficient Fast Gauss Transform. The entropy, written in this embodiment, has the advantage that it is more insensitive to quantization than is the usual definition. The resulting algorithm is quite reliable, and the shadow removal step produces good shadow-free colour image results whenever strong shadow edges are present in the image. In most cases studied, entropy has a strong minimum for the invariant direction, revealing a new property of image formation. We address the problem of developing discriminative, yet invariant, features for texture classification. Texture variations due to changes in scale are amongst the hardest to handle. One of the most successful methods of dealing with such variations is based on choosing interest points and selecting their characteristic scales [ PAMI 2005]. However, selecting a characteristic scale can be unstable for many textures. Furthermore, the reliance on an interest point detector and the inability to evaluate features densely can be serious limitations. Fractals present a mathematically well founded alternative to dealing with the problem of scale. However, they have not become popular as texture features due to their lack of discriminative power. This is primarily because: (a) fractal based classification methods have avoided statistical characterisations of textures (which is essential for accurate analysis) by using global features; and (b) fractal dimension features are unable to distinguish between key texture primitives such as edges, corners and uniform regions. In this paper, we overcome these drawbacks and develop local fractal features that are evaluated densely. The features are robust as they do not depend on choosing interest points or characteristic scales. Furthermore, it is shown that the local fractal dimension is invariant to local bi-Lipschitz transformations whereas its extension is able to correctly distinguish between fundamental texture primitives. Textures are characterised statistically by modelling the full joint PDF of these features. This allows us to develop a texture classification framework which is discriminative, robust and achieves state-of-the-art performance as compared to affine invariant and fractal based methods. Low-light image enhancement methods based on classic Retinex model attempt to manipulate the estimated illumination and to project it back to the corresponding reflectance. However, the model does not consider the noise, which inevitably exists in images captured in low-light conditions. In this paper, we propose the robust Retinex model, which additionally considers a noise map compared with the conventional Retinex model, to improve the performance of enhancing low-light images accompanied by intensive noise. Based on the robust Retinex model, we present an optimization function that includes novel regularization terms for the illumination and reflectance. Specifically, we use @math norm to constrain the piece-wise smoothness of the illumination, adopt a fidelity term for gradients of the reflectance to reveal the structure details in low-light images, and make the first attempt to estimate a noise map out of the robust Retinex model. To effectively solve the optimization problem, we provide an augmented Lagrange multiplier based alternating direction minimization algorithm without logarithmic transformation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in low-light image enhancement. In addition, the proposed method can be generalized to handle a series of similar problems, such as the image enhancement for underwater or remote sensing and in hazy or dusty conditions. Sensations of color show a strong correlation with reflectance, even though the amount of visible light reaching the eye depends on the product of reflectance and illumination. The visual system must achieve this remarkable result by a scheme that does not measure flux. Such a scheme is described as the basis of retinex theory. This theory assumes that there are three independent cone systems, each starting with a set of receptors peaking, respectively, in the long-, middle-, and short-wavelength regions of the visible spectrum. Each system forms a separate image of the world in terms of lightness that shows a strong correlation with reflectance within its particular band of wavelengths. These images are not mixed, but rather are compared to generate color sensations. The problem then becomes how the lightness of areas in these separate images can be independent of flux. This article describes the mathematics of a lightness scheme that generates lightness numbers, the biologic correlate of reflectance, independent of the flux from objects Recent research into recognizing object classes (such as humans, cows and hands) has made use of edge features to hypothesize and localize class instances. However, for the most part, these edge-based methods operate solely on the geometric shape of edges, treating them equally and ignoring the fact that for certain object classes, the appearance of the object on the “inside” of the edge may provide valuable recognition cues. We show how, for such object classes, small regions around edges can be used to classify the edge into object or non-object. This classifier may then be used to prune edges which are not relevant to the object class, and thereby improve the performance of subsequent processing. We demonstrate learning class specific edges for a number of object classes — oranges, bananas and bottles — under challenging scale and illumination variation. Because class-specific edge classification provides a low-level analysis of the image it may be integrated into any edge-based recognition strategy without significant change in the high-level algorithms. We illustrate its application to two algorithms: (i) chamfer matching for object detection, and (ii) modulating contrast terms in MRF based object-specific segmentation. We show that performance of both algorithms (matching and segmentation) is considerably improved by the class-specific edge labelling. This paper presents a novel approach for texture classification, generalizing the well-known local binary pattern (LBP) approach. In the proposed approach, two different and complementary types of features (pixel intensities and differences) are extracted from local patches. The intensity-based features consider the intensity of the central pixel (CI) and those of its neighbors (NI); while for the difference-based feature, two components are computed: the radial-difference (RD) and the angular-difference (AD). Inspired by the LBP approach, two intensity-based descriptors CI-LBP and NI-LBP, and two difference-based descriptors RD-LBP and AD-LBP are developed. All four descriptors are in the same form as conventional LBP codes, so they can be readily combined to form joint histograms to represent textured images. The proposed approach is computationally very simple: it is totally training-free, there is no need to learn a texton dictionary, and no tuning of parameters. We have conducted extensive experiments on three challenging texture databases (Outex, CUReT and KTHTIPS2b). Outex results show significant improvements over the classical LBP approach, which clearly demonstrates the great power of the joint distributions of these proposed descriptors for gray-scale and rotation invariant texture classification. The proposed method produces the best classification results on KTHTIPS2b, and results comparable to the state-of-the-art on CUReT.