One of the key tools in applying physics-based models to machine vision has been the analysis of color histograms. In the mid-1980s it was recognized that the color histogram for a single inhomogeneous surface with highlights will have a planar distribution in color space. It has since been shown that the colors do not fall randomly in a plane, but form clusters at specific points. The shape of...

In this research, we aim to ground scene recognition on information other than the identity of component objects. Specifically we seek to understand the structure of color cues that allows the express recognition of scene gists. Using the L*a*b* color space we examined the conditions under which chromatic cues concur with brightness to allow a viewer to recognize scenes at a glance. Using diffe...

At first, we think that High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging is a technique for improved recordings of scene radiances. Many of us think that human color constancy is a variation of a camera's automatic white balance algorithm. However, on closer inspection, glare limits the range of light we can detect in cameras and on retinas. All scene regions below middle gray are influenced, more or less, by ...

There has been debate about how and why color constancy may be better in three-dimensional (3-D) scenes than in two-dimensional (2-D) scenes. Although some studies have shown better color constancy for 3-D conditions, the role of specific cues remains unclear. In this study, we compared color constancy for a 3-D miniature room (a real scene consisting of actual objects) and 2-D still images of ...

Some familiar objects have a typical color, such as the yellow of a banana. The presence of such objects in a scene is a potential cue to the scene illumination, since the light reflected from them should on average be consistent with their typical surface reflectance. Although there are many studies on how the identity of an object affects how its color is perceived, little is known about whet...

A neural network can learn color constancy, defined here as the ability to estimate the chromaticity of a scene's overall illumination. We describe a multilayer neural network that is able to recover the illumination chromaticity given only an image of the scene. The network is previously trained by being presented with a set of images of scenes and the chromaticities of the corresponding scene...

This paper presents a novel content-based method for transferring the color patterns between images. Unlike previous methods that rely on image color statistics, our method puts an emphasis on high level scene content analysis. We first automatically extract the foreground subject areas and background scene layout from the scene. The semantic correspondences of the regions between source and ta...

Commercial off-the-shelf digital cameras are inexpensive and easy-to-use instruments that can be used for quantitative scientific data acquisition if images are captured in raw format and processed so that they maintain a linear relationship with scene radiance. Here we describe the image-processing steps required for consistent data acquisition with color cameras. In addition, we present a met...

Although photometric data is a readily available dense source of information in intensity images, it is not widely used in computer vision. A major drawback is its dependence on viewpoint and incident illumination. A novel methodology is presented which extracts reflectivity information of the various materials in the scene independent of incident light and scene geometry. A scene is captured u...