International Journal of Computer Vision

The rate of approach (ROA) of a moving observer toward a scene point, as estimated at a given instant, is proportional to the component of the observer's instantaneous velocity in the direction of the point. In this paper we analyze the applicability of Green's theorem to ROA estimation. We derive a formula which relates three quantities: the average value of the ROA for a surface patch in the scene; a surface integral that depends on the surface slant of the patch; and the contour integral of the normal motion field around the image of the boundary of the patch. We analyze how much larger the ROA on the surface patch can be than the value of the contour integral, for given assumptions about the variability of the distance to points on the surface patch. We illustrate our analysis quantitatively using synthetic data, and we also validate it qualitatively on real image sequences.

Retinex theory addresses the problem of separating the illumination from the reflectance in a given image and thereby compensating for non-uniform lighting. This is in general an ill-posed problem. In this paper we propose a variational model for the Retinex problem that unifies previous methods. Similar to previous algorithms, it assumes spatial smoothness of the illumination field. In addition, knowledge of the limited dynamic range of the reflectance is used as a constraint in the recovery process. A penalty term is also included, exploiting a-priori knowledge of the nature of the reflectance image. The proposed formulation adopts a Bayesian view point of the estimation problem, which leads to an algebraic regularization term, that contributes to better conditioning of the reconstruction problem. Based on the proposed variational model, we show that the illumination estimation problem can be formulated as a Quadratic Programming optimization problem. An efficient multi-resolution algorithm is proposed. It exploits the spatial correlation in the reflectance and illumination images. Applications of the algorithm to various color images yield promising results.

In a previous paper, it was proposed to see the deformations of a common pattern as the action of an infinite dimensional group. We show in this paper that this approac h can be applied numerically for pattern matching in image analysis of digital images. Using Lie group ideas, we construct a distance between deformations defined through a metric given the cost of infinitesimal deformations. Then we propose a numerical scheme to solve a variational problem involving this distance and leading to a sub-optimal gradient pattern matching. Its links with fluid models are established.

Recently, DeMenthon and Davis (1992, 1995) proposed a method for determining the pose of a 3-D object with respect to a camera from 3-D to 2-D point correspondences. The method consists of iteratively improving the pose computed with a weak perspective camera model to converge, at the limit, to a pose estimation computed with a perspective camera model. In this paper we give an algebraic derivation of DeMenthon and Davis' method and we show that it belongs to a larger class of methods where the perspective camera model is approximated either at zero order (weak perspective) or first order (paraperspective). We describe in detail an iterative paraperspective pose computation method for both non coplanar and coplanar object points. We analyse the convergence of these methods and we conclude that the iterative paraperspective method (proposed in this paper) has better convergence properties than the iterative weak perspective method. We introduce a simple way of taking into account the orthogonality constraint associated with the rotation matrix. We analyse the sensitivity to camera calibration errors and we define the optimal experimental setup with respect to imprecise camera calibration. We compare the results obtained with this method and with a non-linear optimization method.

We address the problem of computing a general-purpose early visual representation that satisfies two criteria. 1) Explicitness: To be more useful than the original pixel array, the representation must take a significant step toward making important image structure explicit. 2) Completeness: To support a diverse set of high-level tasks, the representation must not discard information of potential perceptual relevance. The most prevalent representation in image processing and computer vision that satisfies the completeness criterion is the wavelet code. In this paper, we propose a very different code which represents the location of each edge and the magnitude and blur scale of the underlying intensity change. By making edge structure explicit, we argue that this representation better satisfies the first criterion than do wavelet codes. To address the second criterion, we study the question of how much visual information is lost in the representation. We report a novel method for inverting the edge code to reconstruct a perceptually accurate estimate of the original image, and thus demonstrate that the proposed representation embodies virtually all of the perceptually relevant information contained in a natural image. This result bears on recent claims that edge representations do not contain all of the information needed for higher level tasks.

We investigate the properties of a metric between two distributions, the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), for content-based image retrieval. The EMD is based on the minimal cost that must be paid to transform one distribution into the other, in a precise sense, and was first proposed for certain vision problems by Peleg, Werman, and Rom. For image retrieval, we combine this idea with a representation scheme for distributions that is based on vector quantization. This combination leads to an image comparison framework that often accounts for perceptual similarity better than other previously proposed methods. The EMD is based on a solution to the transportation problem from linear optimization, for which efficient algorithms are available, and also allows naturally for partial matching. It is more robust than histogram matching techniques, in that it can operate on variable-length representations of the distributions that avoid quantization and other binning problems typical of histograms. When used to compare distributions with the same overall mass, the EMD is a true metric. In this paper we focus on applications to color and texture, and we compare the retrieval performance of the EMD with that of other distances.

We propose a new multiphase level set framework for image segmentation using the Mumford and Shah model, for piecewise constant and piecewise smooth optimal approximations. The proposed method is also a generalization of an active contour model without edges based 2-phase segmentation, developed by the authors earlier in T. Chan and L. Vese (1999. In Scale-Space'99, M. Nilsen et al. (Eds.), LNCS, vol. 1682, pp. 141–151) and T. Chan and L. Vese (2001. IEEE-IP, 10(2):266–277). The multiphase level set formulation is new and of interest on its own: by construction, it automatically avoids the problems of vacuum and overlap; it needs only log n level set functions for n phases in the piecewise constant case; it can represent boundaries with complex topologies, including triple junctions; in the piecewise smooth case, only two level set functions formally suffice to represent any partition, based on The Four-Color Theorem. Finally, we validate the proposed models by numerical results for signal and image denoising and segmentation, implemented using the Osher and Sethian level set method.