Search

Milano Retinex is a family of spatial color algorithms inspired by Retinex and mainly devoted to the image enhancement. In the so-called point-based sampling Milano Retinex algorithms, this task is accomplished by processing the color of each image pixel based on a set of colors sampled in its surround. This paper presents STAR, a segmentation based approximation of the point-based sampling Milano Retinex approaches: it replaces the pixel-wise image sampling by a novel, computationally efficient procedure that detects once for all the color and spatial information relevant to image enhancement from clusters of pixels output by a segmentation. The experiments reported here show that STAR performs similarly to previous point-based sampling Milano Retinex approaches and that STAR enhancement improves the accuracy of the well-known algorithm scale-invariant feature transform on the description and matching of photographs captured under difficult light conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new framework for hierarchical image segmentation based on iterative contraction and merging. In the proposed framework, we treat the hierarchical image segmentation problem as a sequel of optimization problems, with each optimization process being realized by a contraction-and-merging process to identify and merge the most similar data pairs at the current resolution. At the beginning, we perform pixel-based contraction and merging to quickly combine image pixels into initial region-elements with visually indistinguishable intra-region color difference. After that, we iteratively perform region-based contraction and merging to group adjacent regions into larger ones to progressively form a segmentation dendrogram for hierarchical segmentation. Comparing with the state-of-the-art techniques, the proposed algorithm can not only produce high-quality segmentation results in a more efficient way, but also keep a lot of boundary details in the segmentation results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we present a new algorithm for real-time single-object tracking in videos in unconstrained environments. The algorithm comprises two different components that are trained “in one shot” at the first video frame: a detector that makes use of the generalized Hough transform with color and gradient descriptors and a probabilistic segmentation method based on global models for foreground and background color distributions. Both components work at pixel level and are used for tracking in a combined way adapting each other in a co-training manner. Moreover, we propose an adaptive shape model as well as a new probabilistic method for updating the scale of the tracker. Through effective model adaptation and segmentation, the algorithm is able to track objects that undergo rigid and non-rigid deformations and considerable shape and appearance variations. The proposed tracking method has been thoroughly evaluated on challenging benchmarks, and outperforms the state-of-the-art tracking methods designed for the same task. Finally, a very efficient implementation of the proposed models allows for extremely fast tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]