Search Results (5)

To achieve computer vision color constancy (CVCC), it is vital but challenging to estimate scene illumination from a digital image, which distorts the true color of an object. Estimating illumination as accurately as possible is fundamental to improving the quality of the image processing pipeline. CVCC has a long history of research and has significantly advanced, but it has yet to overcome some limitations such as algorithm failure or accuracy decreasing under unusual circumstances. To cope with some of the bottlenecks, this article presents a novel CVCC approach that introduces a residual-in-residual dense selective kernel network (RiR-DSN). As its name implies, it has a residual network in a residual network (RiR) and the RiR houses a dense selective kernel network (DSN). A DSN is composed of selective kernel convolutional blocks (SKCBs). The SKCBs, or neurons herein, are interconnected in a feed-forward fashion. Every neuron receives input from all its preceding neurons and feeds the feature maps into all its subsequent neurons, which is how information flows in the proposed architecture. In addition, the architecture has incorporated a dynamic selection mechanism into each neuron to ensure that the neuron can modulate filter kernel sizes depending on varying intensities of stimuli. In a nutshell, the proposed RiR-DSN architecture features neurons called SKCBs and a residual block in a residual block, which brings several benefits such as alleviation of the vanishing gradients, enhancement of feature propagation, promotion of the reuse of features, modulation of receptive filter sizes depending on varying intensities of stimuli, and a dramatic drop in the number of parameters. Experimental results highlight that the RiR-DSN architecture performs well above its state-of-the-art counterparts, as well as proving to be camera- and illuminant-invariant. Full article

Computational color constancy (CCC) is a fundamental prerequisite for many computer vision tasks. The key of CCC is to estimate illuminant color so that the image of a scene under varying illumination can be normalized to an image under the canonical illumination. As a type of solution, combination algorithms generally try to reach better illuminant estimation by weighting other unitary algorithms for a given image. However, due to the diversity of image features, applying the same weighting combination strategy to different images might result in unsound illuminant estimation. To address this problem, this study provides an effective option. A two-step strategy is first employed to cluster the training images, then for each cluster, ANFIS (adaptive neuro-network fuzzy inference system) models are effectively trained to map image features to illuminant color. While giving a test image, the fuzzy weights measuring what degrees the image belonging to each cluster are calculated, thus a reliable illuminant estimation will be obtained by weighting all ANFIS predictions. The proposed method allows illuminant estimation to be dynamic combinations of initial illumination estimates from some unitary algorithms, relying on the powerful learning and reasoning capabilities of ANFIS. Extensive experiments on typical benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In addition, although there is an initial observation that some learning-based methods outperform even the most carefully designed and tested combinations of statistical and fuzzy inference systems, the proposed method is good practice for illuminant estimation considering fuzzy inference eases to implement in imaging signal processors with if-then rules and low computation efforts. Full article

For more than a decade, both academia and industry have focused attention on the computer vision and in particular the computational color constancy (CVCC). The CVCC is used as a fundamental preprocessing task in a wide range of computer vision applications. While our human visual system (HVS) has the innate ability to perceive constant surface colors of objects under varying illumination spectra, the computer vision is facing the color constancy challenge in nature. Accordingly, this article proposes novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture based on the residual neural network which consists of pre-activation, atrous or dilated convolution and batch normalization. The proposed network can automatically decide what to learn from input image data and how to pool without supervision. When receiving input image data, the proposed network crops each image into image patches prior to training. Once the network begins learning, local semantic information is automatically extracted from the image patches and fed to its novel pooling layer. As a result of the semantic pooling, a weighted map or a mask is generated. Simultaneously, the extracted information is estimated and combined to form global information during training. The use of the novel pooling layer enables the proposed network to distinguish between useful data and noisy data, and thus efficiently remove noisy data during learning and evaluating. The main contribution of the proposed network is taking CVCC to higher accuracy and efficiency by adopting the novel pooling method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms its conventional counterparts in estimation accuracy. Full article

Images are an important medium to represent meaningful information. It may be difficult for computer vision techniques and humans to extract valuable information from images with low illumination. Currently, the enhancement of low-quality images is a challenging task in the domain of image processing and computer graphics. Although there are many algorithms for image enhancement, the existing techniques often produce defective results with respect to the portions of the image with intense or normal illumination, and such techniques also inevitably degrade certain visual artifacts of the image. The model use for image enhancement must perform the following tasks: preserving details, improving contrast, color correction, and noise suppression. In this paper, we have proposed a framework based on a camera response and weighted least squares strategies. First, the image exposure is adjusted using brightness transformation to obtain the correct model for the camera response, and an illumination estimation approach is used to extract a ratio map. Then, the proposed model adjusts every pixel according to the calculated exposure map and Retinex theory. Additionally, a dehazing algorithm is used to remove haze and improve the contrast of the image. The color constancy parameters set the true color for images of low to average quality. Finally, a details enhancement approach preserves the naturalness and extracts more details to enhance the visual quality of the image. The experimental evidence and a comparison with several, recent state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrated that our designed framework is effective and can efficiently enhance low-light images. Full article

The European Space Agency (ESA) defines Earth observation (EO) Level 2 information product the stack of: (i) a single-date multi-spectral (MS) image, radiometrically corrected for atmospheric, adjacency and topographic effects, with (ii) its data-derived scene classification map (SCM), whose thematic map legend includes quality layers cloud and cloud–shadow. Never accomplished to date in an operating mode by any EO data provider at the ground segment, systematic ESA EO Level 2 product generation is an inherently ill-posed computer vision (CV) problem (chicken-and-egg dilemma) in the multi-disciplinary domain of cognitive science, encompassing CV as subset-of artificial general intelligence (AI). In such a broad context, the goal of our work is the research and technological development (RTD) of a “universal” AutoCloud+ software system in operating mode, capable of systematic cloud and cloud–shadow quality layers detection in multi-sensor, multi-temporal and multi-angular EO big data cubes characterized by the five Vs, namely, volume, variety, veracity, velocity and value. For the sake of readability, this paper is divided in two. Part 1 highlights why AutoCloud+ is important in a broad context of systematic ESA EO Level 2 product generation at the ground segment. The main conclusions of Part 1 are both conceptual and pragmatic in the definition of remote sensing best practices, which is the focus of efforts made by intergovernmental organizations such as the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS). First, the ESA EO Level 2 product definition is recommended for consideration as state-of-the-art EO Analysis Ready Data (ARD) format. Second, systematic multi-sensor ESA EO Level 2 information product generation is regarded as: (a) necessary-but-not-sufficient pre-condition for the yet-unaccomplished dependent problems of semantic content-based image retrieval (SCBIR) and semantics-enabled information/knowledge discovery (SEIKD) in multi-source EO big data cubes, where SCBIR and SEIKD are part-of the GEO-CEOS visionary goal of a yet-unaccomplished Global EO System of Systems (GEOSS). (b) Horizontal policy, the goal of which is background developments, in a “seamless chain of innovation” needed for a new era of Space Economy 4.0. In the subsequent Part 2 (proposed as Supplementary Materials), the AutoCloud+ software system requirements specification, information/knowledge representation, system design, algorithm, implementation and preliminary experimental results are presented and discussed. Full article