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27 pags., 16 figs., Many challenges that deal with processing of HDR material remain very much open for the film industry, whose extremely demanding quality standards are not met by existing automatic methods. Therefore, when dealing with HDR content, substantial work by very skilled technicians has to be carried out at every step of the movie production chain. Based on recent findings and models from vision science, we propose in this work effective tone mapping and inverse tone mapping algorithms for production, post-production and exhibition. These methods are automatic and real-time, and they have been both fine-tuned and validated by cinema professionals, with psychophysical tests demonstrating that the proposed algorithms outperform both the academic and industrial state-of-the-art. We believe these methods bring the field closer to having fully automated solutions for important challenges for the cinema industry that are currently solved manually or sub-optimally. Another contribution of our research is to highlight the limitations of existing image quality metrics when applied to the tone mapping problem, as none of them, including two state-of-the-art deep learning metrics for image perception, are able to predict the preferences of the observers., This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 761544 (project HDR4EU) and under grant agreement number 780470 (project SAUCE), and by the Spanish government and FEDER Fund, grant ref. PGC2018-099651-B-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE).

We propose a method for color dehazing with four main characteristics: it does not introduce color artifacts, it does not depend on inverting any physical equation, it is based on models of visual perception, and it is fast, potentially real time. Our method converts the original input image to the HSV color space and works in the saturation and value domains by: (1) reducing the value component via a global constrained histogram flattening; (2) modifying the saturation component in consistency with the previous reduced value; and (3) performing a local contrast enhancement in the value component. Results show that our method competes with the state-of-the-art when dealing with standard hazy images, and outperforms it when dealing with challenging haze cases. Furthermore, our method is able to dehaze a FullHD image on a GPU in 90 ms.

In vision science, cascades of Linear+Nonlinear transforms are very successful in modeling a number of perceptual experiences. However, the conventional literature is usually too focused on only describing the forward input-output transform. Instead, in this work we present the mathematics of such cascades beyond the forward transform, namely the Jacobian matrices and the inverse. The fundamental reason for this analytical treatment is that it offers useful analytical insight into the psychophysics, the physiology, and the function of the visual system. For instance, we show how the trends of the sensitivity (volume of the discrimination regions) and the adaptation of the receptive fields can be identified in the expression of the Jacobian w.r.t. the stimulus. This matrix also tells us which regions of the stimulus space are encoded more efficiently in multi-information terms. The Jacobian w.r.t. the parameters shows which aspects of the model have bigger impact in the response, and hence their relative relevance. The analytic inverse implies conditions for the response and model parameters to ensure appropriate decoding. From the experimental and applied perspective, (a) the Jacobian w.r.t. the stimulus is necessary in new experimental methods based on the synthesis of visual stimuli with interesting geometrical properties, (b) the Jacobian matrices w.r.t. the parameters are convenient to learn the model from classical experiments or alternative goal optimization, and (c) the inverse is a promising model-based alternative to blind machine-learning methods for neural decoding that do not include meaningful biological information. The theory is checked by building and testing a vision model that actually follows a modular Linear+Nonlinear program. Our illustrative derivable and invertible model consists of a cascade of modules that account for brightness, contrast, energy masking, and wavelet masking. To stress the generality of this modular setting we show examples where some of the canonical Divisive Normalization modules are substituted by equivalent modules such as the Wilson-Cowan interaction model (at the V1 cortex) or a tone-mapping model (at the retina)., This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad projects CICYT TEC2013-50520-EXP and CICYT BFU2014-59776-R, by the European Research Council, Starting Grant ref. 306337, by the Spanish government and FEDER Fund, grant ref. TIN2015-71537-P(MINECO/FEDER,UE), 1021, and by the ICREA Academia Award.

Due to technical limitations, common display devices can only reproduce images having a low range of intensity values (dynamic range). As a consequence, the dynamic range of images encoding real world scenes, which is large, has to be compressed in order for them to be reproduced on a common display, and this technique is called tone mapping. Because there is no ground truth to compare with, evaluation of a tone mapped image has to be done by comparing with the original high dynamic range image. As standard metrics based on pixel-wise comparisons are not suitable for comparing images of different dynamic range, non local perceptual based metrics are commonly used. We propose a general method for optimizing tone mapped images with respect to a given non local metric. In particular, if the metric is perceptual, i.e. it involves perceptual concepts, we provide an adequate minimization strategy. Experiments on a particular perceptual metric tested with different tone mapped images provided by several tone mapping operators validate our approach. This work was supported by European Research Council, Starting Grant ref. 306337, and by Spanish grants ref. TIN2011-15954-E and ref. TIN2012-38112.

Comunicació presentada a: 6th Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology, celebrat del 28 d'octubre a 1 de novembre de 2013 a Guanajuato, Mèxic. Given any metric that compares images of di erent dynamic range, we propose a method to reduce their distance with respect to this metric. The key idea is to consider the metric as a non local operator. Then, we transform the problem of distance reduction into a non local variational problem. In this context, the low dynamic range image having the smallest distance with a given high dynamic range is the minimum of a suitable energy, and can be reached through a gradient descent algorithm. Dealing with an appropriate metric, we present an application to Tone Mapping Operator (TMO) optimization. We apply our gradient descent algorithm, where the initial conditions are Tone Mapped (TM) images. Experiments show that our algorithm does reduce the distance of the TM images with the high dynamic range source images, meaning that our method improves the corresponding TMOs. This work was supported by the European Research Council, Starting Grant ref. 306337, and by Spanish grants ref. TIN2011-15954-E and ref. TIN2012-38112.

Pedestrian detection is one of the most important components in driver-assistance system. A performance analysis is done with various classifiers (AdaBoost, Neural Network and SVM) and its behavior of the system is analyzed. As there is large intra-class variability in the pedestrian class, a two stage classifier is used. A review of different pedestrian detection system is done in the paper. Classifiers are arranged based on HAAR-like and HOG features in a coarse to fine manner. Adaboost gives better performance.

High dynamic range imaging techniques involve capturing and storing real world radiance values that span many orders of magnitude. However, common display devices can usually reproduce intensity ranges only up to two to three orders of magnitude. Therefore, in order to display a high dynamic range image on a low dynamic range screen, the dynamic range of the image needs to be compressed without losing details or introducing artefacts, and this process is called tone mapping. A good tone mapping operator must be able to produce a low dynamic range image that matches as much as possible the perception of the real world scene. We propose a two stage tone mapping approach, in which the first stage is a global method for range compression based on a gamma curve that equalizes the lightness histogram the best, and the second stage performs local contrast enhancement and color induction using neural activity models for the visual cortex. © (2015) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only. This work was supported by the European Research Council, Starting Grant ref. 306337, by the Spanish government, grant ref. TIN2012-38112, and by the Icrea Academia Award.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) technologies support the capture and presentation of a wider range of luminance values than conventional systems. An important element of video processing is the transfer function which should emulate human perception and this needs to be revisited for HDR content and displays. In the paper, we adapt a nonlinearity designed for the tone-mapping problem to the problem of video coding. We test the nonlinearity using the Motion Picture Experts Group methodology and find it can outperform existing methods in terms of HDR video quality measure. This work was partially supported by the European Research Council, Starting Grant ref. 306337, by the Spanish government and FEDER Fund, grant ref. TIN2015-71537-P (MINECO/FEDER,UE), and by the Icrea Academia Award.

Scenes with back-light illumination are problematic when captured with a typical LDR camera, as they result in dark regions where details are not perceivable. In this paper, we present a method that, given an LDR backlit image, outputs an image where the information that was not visible in the dark regions is recovered without losing information in the already well-exposed parts of the image. Our method has three main steps: first, a variational model is minimized using gradient descent, and the iterates of the minimization are used to obtain a set of weight maps. Second, we consider the tone-mapping framework [3] that depends on four parameters. Two different sets of parameters are learned by dividing the image in the darker and lighter parts. Then, we interpolate the two sets of parameter values in as many sets as weighting maps, and tone-map the original image with each set of parameters. Finally, we merge the new tone-mapped images depending on the weighting maps. Results show that our method outperforms current backlit image enhancement approaches both quantitatively and qualitatively.