A review of methods for volumetric scene reconstruction from multiple views is presented. Occupancy descriptions of the voxels in a scene volume are constructed using shape-from-silhouette techniques for binary images, and shapefrom-photo-consistency combined with visibility testing for color images.

Background subtraction is a method typically used to segment moving regions in image sequences taken from a static camera by comparing each new frame to a model of the scene background. We present a novel non-parametric background model and a background subtraction approach. The model can handle situations where the background of the scene is cluttered and not completely static but contains sma...

Realistic rendering of underwater scenes is one of the most anticipated research topics in computer graphics. Caustics are the important component enhancing the realism of this kind of scenes. Unfortunately, rendering caustics is a time consuming task. As a result, most existing algorithms cannot handle this at interactive rate. In recent years, volumetric texture based rendering algorithms hav...

For a visual system to possess color constancy across varying illumination, chromatic signals from a scene must remain constant at some neural stage. We found that photoreceptor and opponent-color signals from a large sample of natural and man-made objects under one kind of natural daylight were almost perfectly correlated with the signals from those objects under every other spectrally differe...

Image gradients--smooth changes in color and luminance--may be caused by intrinsic surface reflectance properties or extrinsic illumination phenomena, including shading, shadowing, and inter-reflections. In turn, image gradients may provide the visual system with information concerning the origin of these factors, such as the orientation of surfaces with respect to the light source. Color gradi...

Humans can only just recognize images with a geometric resolution of 32× 32 pixels. However, this fact does not mean that it is also possible to assign predefined scene category labels like indoor, outdoor, kitchen or beach to such a tiny image, neither for humans nor for computers. The purpose of our work is to investigate the applicability of common scene categorization methods and the import...

When referring to a target object in a visual scene, speakers are assumed to consider certain distractor objects that are visible to be more relevant than others. However, previous research that has tested this assumption has mainly applied offline measures of visual attention, such as the occurrence of overspecification in speakers’ target descriptions. Therefore, in the current study, we take...

Outdoor scene classification is challenging due to irregular geometry, uncontrolled illumination, and noisy reflectance distributions. This paper discusses a Bayesian approach to classifying a color image of an outdoor scene. A likelihood model factors in the physics of the image formation process, the sensor noise distribution, and prior distributions over geometry, material types, and illumin...

Blurred images can appear to fade to uniform brightness and color when viewed with some types of visual transient stimuli. Simons et al. (2006) identified the conditions where such scene fading occurs and noted that their findings were inconsistent with mechanisms that have been used to explain other fading effects. We show that their empirical findings are consistent with a neural model of vis...