Color edge detection by photometric quasi-invariants

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2000

Feature detection is used in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation, object recognition, and image retrieval. For these applications, robustness with respect to shadows, shading, and specularities is desired. Features based on derivatives of photometric invariants, which we will call full invariants, provide the desired robustness. However, because computation of photometric invariants involves nonlinear transformations, these features are unstable and, therefore, impractical for many applications. We propose a new class of derivatives which we refer to as quasi-invariants. These quasi-invariants are derivatives which share with full photometric invariants the property that they are insensitive for certain photometric edges, such as shadows or specular edges, but without the inherent instabilities of full photometric invariants. Experiments show that the quasi-invariant derivatives are less sensitive to noise and introduce less edge displacement than full invariant derivatives. Moreover, quasi-invariants significantly outperform the full invariant derivatives in terms of discriminative power.

2004

Luminance-based features are widely used as low-level input for computer vision applications, even when color data is available. Extension of feature detection to the color domain prevents information loss due to isoluminance and allows to exploit the photometric information. To fully exploit the extra information in the color data, the vector nature of color data has to be taken into account and a sound framework is needed to combine feature and photometric invariance theory. In this paper we focus on the structure tensor, or color tensor, which adequately handles the vector nature of color images. Further, we combine the features based on the color tensor with photometric invariant derivatives to arrive at photometric invariant features. We circumvent the drawback of unstable photometric invariants by deriving an uncertainty measure to accompany the photometric invariant derivatives. The uncertainty is incorporated in the color tensor, hereby allowing the computation of robust photometric invariant features. The combination of the photometric invariance theory and tensorbased features allows for detection of a variety of features such as photometric invariant edges, corners, optical flow and curvature. The proposed features are tested for noise characteristics and robustness to photometric changes. Experiments show that the proposed features are robust to scene incidental events and that the proposed uncertainty measure improves the applicability of full invariants.

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2000

Luminance-based features are widely used as low-level input for computer vision applications, even when color data is available. Extension of feature detection to the color domain prevents information loss due to isoluminance and allows to exploit the photometric information. To fully exploit the extra information in the color data, the vector nature of color data has to be taken into account and a sound framework is needed to combine feature and photometric invariance theory.

Pattern Recognition, 2012

Illumination invariance remains one of the most researched, yet the most challenging aspect of automatic face recognition. In this paper the discriminative power of colour-based invariants is investigated in the presence of large illumination changes between training and query data, when appearance changes due to cast shadows and non-Lambertian effects are significant. Specifically, there are three main contributions: (i) a general photometric model of the camera is described and it is shown how its parameters can be estimated from realistic video input of pseudo-random head motion, (ii) several novel colour-based face invariants are derived for different special instances of the camera model, and (iii) the performance of the largest number of colour-based representations in the literature is evaluated and analysed on a database of 700 video sequences. The reported results suggest that: (i) colour invariants do have a substantial discriminative power which may increase the robustness and accuracy of recognition from low resolution images in extreme illuminations, and (ii) that the non-linearities of the general photometric camera model have a significant effect on recognition performance. This highlights the limitations of previous work and emphasizes the need to assess face recognition performance using training and query data which had been captured by different acquisition equipment.

1997

Our aim is to analyze and evaluate di erent color models to be used for the purpose of 3-D object recognition by color-metric histogram matching according to the following criteria: invariance to the geometry of the object and illumination circumstances, high discriminative power, and noise robustness.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1999

Segmentation based on color, instead of intensity only, provides an easier distinction between materials, on the condition that robustness against irrelevant parameters is achieved, such as illumination source, shadows, geometry and camera sensitivities. Modeling the physical process of the image formation provides insight into the effect of different parameters on object color. In this paper, a color differential geometry approach is used to detect material edges, invariant with respect to illumination color and imaging conditions. The performance of the color invariants is demonstrated by some real-world examples, showing the invariants to be successful in discounting shadow edges and illumination color.

Procedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 1998, 1998

In this paper, we concentrate on determining homogeneously colored regions invariant to surface orientation change, illumination, shadows and highlights.

2003

We derive a new class of photometric invariants that can be used for a variety of vision tasks including lighting invariant material segmentation, change detection and tracking, as well as material invariant shape recognition. The key idea is the formulation of a scene radiance model for the class of "separable" BRDFs, that can be decomposed into material related terms and object shape and lighting related terms. All the proposed invariants are simple rational functions of the appearance parameters (say, material or shape and lighting). The invariants in this class differ from one another in the number and type of image measurements they require. Most of the invariants in this class need changes in illumination or object position between image acquisitions. The invariants can handle large changes in lighting which pose problems for most existing vision algorithms. We demonstrate the power of these invariants using scenes with complex shapes, materials, textures, shadows and specularities.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 2008

Complex reflectance phenomena such as specular reflections confound many vision problems since they produce image 'features' that do not correspond directly to intrinsic surface properties such as shape and spectral reflectance. A common approach to mitigate these effects is to explore functions of an image that are invariant to these photometric events. In this paper we describe a class of such invariants that result from exploiting color information in images of dichromatic surfaces. These invariants are derived from illuminant-dependent 'subspaces' of RGB color space, and they enable the application of Lambertian-based vision techniques to a broad class of specular, non-Lambertian scenes. Using implementations of recent algorithms taken from the literature, we demonstrate the practical utility of these invariants for a wide variety of applications, including stereo, shape from shading, photometric stereo, materialbased segmentation, and motion estimation.

IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, 2008

Illumination invariance remains the most researched, yet the most challenging aspect of automatic face recognition. In this paper we investigate the discriminative power of colour-based invariants in the presence of large illumination changes between training and test data, when appearance changes due to cast shadows and non-Lambertian effects are significant. Specifically, there are three main contributions: (i) we employ a more sophisticated photometric model of the camera and show how its parameters can be estimated, (ii) we derive several novel colour-based face invariants, and (iii) on a large database of video sequences we examine and evaluate the largest number of colour-based representations in the literature. Our results suggest that colour invariants do have a substantial discriminative power which may increase the robustness and accuracy of recognition from low resolution images.