Colour and rotation invariant textural features based on Markov random fields

A visual appearance of natural materials significantly depends on acquisition circumstances, particularly illumination conditions and viewpoint position, whose variations cause difficulties in the analysis of real scenes. We address this issue with novel texture features, based on fast estimates of Markovian statistics, that are simultaneously rotation and illumination invariant. The proposed features are invariant to in-plane material rotation and illumination spectrum (colour invariance), they are robust to local intensity changes (cast shadows) and illumination direction. No knowledge of illumination conditions is required and recognition is possible from a single training image per material. The material recognition is tested on the currently most realistic visual representation - Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF), using CUReT and ALOT texture datasets with more than 250 natural materials. Our proposed features significantly outperform leading alternatives including Local Binary Patterns (LBP, LBP-HF) and texton MR8 methods.     

Face recognition based on 2D images under illumination and pose variations

We propose a novel 2D image-based approach that can simultaneously handle illumination and pose variations to enhance face recognition rate. It is much simpler, requires much less computational effort than the methods based on 3D models, and provides a comparable or better recognition rate.     

基于网络的照明智能调控技术分析

针对传统的照明调控技术的缺陷,近年来大力发展了基于网络的照明智能调控技术,与传统照明调节技术相比,具有远程集控、智能调节、高效方便等技术优势和经济优势。在此分析的基础上,对基于网络化的照明智能调控技术从硬件设计和软件设计两个角度进行了技术剖析,对于基于网络化的照明智能调控技术的实现具有一定的借鉴和参考价值。     

一种新的图像纹理表示方法

该文基于纹理元直方图导出了纹理的新表示方法,并根据正交镜像滤波器的小波变换能量的转换和量化来定义纹理元。此种,给出了数种小波纹理特征集的实验评价,此方法具有将Brodatz纹理分类的极好性能。同时还研究了数种考虑近似旋转不变性或比例不变性的变换。最后,引入了生成纹理直方图和形成二进制纹理集的特征空间的过程,而且纹理直方图和二进制纹理集的特征空间与颜色直方图是对称的。获得纹理的这些表示旨在为度量纹理的相似性和从图像中抽取纹理区域。     

Content-based image retrieval using joint correlograms

The comparison of digital images to determine their degree of similarity is one of the fundamental problems of computer vision. Many techniques exist which accomplish this with a certain level of success, most of which involve either the analysis of pixel-level features or the segmentation of images into sub-objects that can be geometrically compared. In this paper we develop and evaluate a new variation of the pixel feature and analysis technique known as the color correlogram in the context of a content-based image retrieval system. Our approach is to extend the autocorrelogram by adding multiple image features in addition to color. We compare the performance of each index scheme with our method for image retrieval on a large database of images. The experiment shows that our proposed method gives a significant improvement over histogram or color correlogram indexing, and it is also memory-efficient.

Efficient and robust shot change detection

In this article, we deal with the problem of shot change detection which is of primary importance when trying to segment and abstract video sequences. Contrary to recent experiments, our aim is to elaborate a robust but very efficient (real-time even with uncompressed data) method to deal with the remaining problems related to shot change detection: illumination changes, context and data independency, and parameter settings. To do so, we have considered some adaptive threshold and derivative measures in a hue-saturation colour space. We illustrate our robust and efficient method by some experiments on news and football broadcast video sequences.

A circular visualization of people׳s activities in distributed teams

When working in distributed teams, it is very important to be aware of the activities of all members, since it provides hints about when they might be available for collaboration. We propose a novel visualization technique that combines several representations to show the daily patterns of team members׳ activities. It uses a 24 h circular display to facilitate international collaboration across time zones. Current calendar information can be compared to the typical patterns and reveal likely availability. User studies evaluating the tool that implements the proposed technique are reported and discussed.     

Constrained Smoothing of Histograms and Scatterplots With Simulated Annealing

Histogram and scatterplot models are often required for statistical inference. In the field of petroleum engineering, stochastic simulation algorithms require, among other statistics, a model for the histogram of the petrophysical attribute (porosity/permeability) being simulated. Often this model is taken to be the deciustered distribution of the sample data. When there are many data (say, greater than l,000), this histogram may be reasonably informed. Most often, however, the sample histogram shows multiple sawtoothlike spikes that are not representative of the entire population; the sample histogram must be smoothed. A simulated annealing-based procedure is proposed for smoothing one-variable (univariate) histograms and two-variable scatterplots (bivariate histograms). The smoothed histograms are constrained to the sample mean, variance, specified quantiles, and a measure of smoothness. In the bivariate case, the distribution must be consistent with both marginal histograms and can be additionally constrained to a linear correlation coefficient. Several examples with real reservoir data are presented.     

Lighting preferences in office spaces concerning the indoor thermal environment

The accurate prediction of the visual comfort zone in an indoor environment is difficult as it depends on many parameters. This is especially the case for large compact urban areas in which the density and shadow from neighboring buildings can limit the accessible daylighting in indoor spaces. This paper investigates the satisfaction range for illuminance regarding indoor air temperature in office buildings and the significant parameters affecting this range in six office buildings in Tehran, Iran. Lighting comfort has been evaluated by a subjective survey (509 total responses) and field measurement. The questionnaires were filled out in 146 and 109 rooms in summer and winter, respectively. The results show that the illuminance should not be less than 550 lx, while illuminance between 600 and 650 lx provides the highest satisfaction level. The satisfaction with lighting level is affected by individual parameters such as age, type of activity, and environmental parameters such as window orientation, external obscurations, and season. A relationship was observed between lighting level satisfaction and thermal condition acceptance, and the overall comfort depends more on thermal conditions than the lighting level.     

Adaptive reversible data hiding for JPEG images with multiple two-dimensional histograms

Joint photographic experts group (JPEG) can provide good quality with small file size but also eliminate extensively the redundancies of images. Therefore, hiding data into JPEG images in terms of maintaining high visual quality at small file sizes has been a great challenge for researchers. In this paper, an adaptive reversible data hiding method for JPEG images containing multiple two-dimensional (2D) histograms is proposed. Adaptability is mainly reflected in three aspects. The first one is to preferentially select sharper histograms for data embedding after $K$ histograms are established by constructing the $k$th ($k\in \{1,2,\dots ,K\}$) histogram using the $k$th non-zero alternating current (AC) coefficient of all the quantized discrete cosine transform blocks. On the other hand, to fully exploit the strong correlation between coefficients of one histogram, the smoothness of each coefficient is estimated by a block smoothness estimator so that a sharply-distributed 2D-histogram is constructed by combining two coefficients with similar smoothness into a pair. The pair corresponding to low complexity is selected priorly for data embedding, leading to high embedding performance while maintaining low file size. Besides, we design multiple embedding strategies to adaptively select the embedding strategy for each 2D histogram. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve higher rate–distortion performance which maintaining lower file storage space, compared with previous studies.