Luong, Q.-T. Color in computer visionin Handbook of pattern recognition and computer vision, World scientific, 1993.
Abstract
The use of color in computer vision has received growing attention. This chapter gives the state-of-the-art in this subfield, and tries to answer the questions: What is color? Which are the adequate representations? How is it computed? What can be done using it?
The first section introduces some basic tools and models that can be used to describe the color imaging process. We first summarize the classical photometric and colorimetric notions: light measurement, intensity equation, color signal, color perception, trichromatic theory. The growing interest in color during the last few years comes from two new classes of models of reflection, physical models and linear models, which lead to highlight algorithms as well as color constancy algorithms. We present these models in detail and discuss some of their limitations.
The second section deals with the problem of color constancy. The term “color constancy” refers to the fact that the colors perceived by humans in real scenes are relatively stable under large variations of illumination and of material composition of scenes. From a computational standpoint, achieving color constancy is an underdetermined problem: computing the spectral reflectance from the sensor measurements. We compare three classes of color constancy algorithms, based on lightness computation, linear models, and physical models, respectively. For each class, the principle is explained, and one or two significant algorithms are given. A comparative study serves to introduce the others.
The third section is concerned with the use of color in universal, i.e. mainly low-level, vision tasks. We emphasize the distinction between tasks that have been extensively studied in monochromatic images and for which the contribution of color is just a quantitative generalization, and tasks where color has a qualitative role. In the first case, additional image features are obtained, and have to be represented and used efficiently. In the latter case, it is hoped that color can help recover intrinsic physical properties of scenes. We study successively three important themes in computer vision: edges, segmentation, matching. For each of them, we present the two frameworks for the use of color.
