Enhancing spatio-chromatic representation with more-than-three color coding for image description

@Article\{RVB2017,
  author       = "Ivet Rafegas and Javier Vazquez-Corral and Robert Benavente and Maria Vanrell and Susana Alvarez Fernandez",
  title        = "Enhancing spatio-chromatic representation with more-than-three color coding for image description",
  journal      = "Journal of the Optical Society of America A",
  number       = "5",
  volume       = "34",
  pages        = "827--837",
  year         = "2017",
  abstract     = "Extraction of spatio-chromatic features from color images is usually performed independently on each color channel. Usual 3D color spaces, such as RGB, present a high inter-channel correlation for natural images. This correlation can be reduced using color-opponent representations, but the spatial structure of regions with small color differences is not fully captured in two generic Red-Green and Blue-Yellow channels. To overcome these problems, we propose a new color coding that is adapted to the specific content of each image. Our proposal is based on two steps: (a) setting the number of channels to the number of distinctive colors we find in each image (avoiding the problem of channel correlation), and (b) building a channel representation that maximizes contrast differences within each color channel (avoiding the problem of low local contrast). We call this approach more-than-three color coding (MTT) to enhance the fact that the number of channels is adapted to the image content. The higher color complexity an image has, the more channels can be used to represent it. Here we select distinctive colors as the most predominant in the image, which we call color pivots, and we build the new color coding using these color pivots as a basis. To evaluate the proposed approach we measure its efficiency in an image categorization task. We show how a generic descriptor improves its performance at the description level when applied on the MTT coding. ",
  url          = "http://cat.cvc.uab.es/Public/Publications/2017/RVB2017"
}