Estimating the age of historical photographs is a challenging task for human beings. Only recently this task has been addressed in computational image analysis perspective. The characteristics of the device used to acquire each photograph are discriminative features for this task. We aim at extracting such characteristics from a historical color photographs. The acquisition device mainly effects two properties of the colors: the distribution of their derivatives and the angles drawn by three consecutive pixels in the RGB space. We propose two color features that take advantage of these observations. We show that these two color descriptors (namely color derivatives and color angles) attain the state-of-the-art in the context of image dating.

Color description is a challenging task because of large variations in RGB values which occur due to scene accidental events, such as shadows, shading, specularities, illuminant color changes, and changes in viewing geometry. Traditionally, this challenge has been addressed by capturing the variations in physics-based models, and deriving invariants for the undesired variations. The drawback of this approach is that sets of distinguishable colors in the original color space are mapped to the same value in the photometric invariant space. This results in a drop of discriminative power of the color description. In this paper we take an information theoretic approach to color description. We cluster color values together based on their discriminative power in a classification problem. The clustering has the explicit objective to minimize the drop of mutual information of the final representation. We show that such a color description automatically learns a certain degree of photometric invariance. We also show that a universal color representation, which is based on other data sets than the one at hand, can obtain competing performance. Experiments show that the proposed descriptor outperforms existing photometric invariants. Furthermore, we show that combined with shape description these color descriptors obtain excellent results on four challenging datasets, namely, PASCAL VOC 2007, Flowers-102, Stanford dogs-120 and Birds-200.

We propose a method to acquire multispectral data with handheld devices with front-mounted RGB cameras. We propose to use the display of the device as an illuminant while the camera captures images illuminated by the red, green and blue primaries of the display. Three illuminants and three response functions of the camera lead to nine response values which are used for reflectance estimation. Results are promising and show that the accuracy of the spectral reconstruction improves in the range of 30-40% over the spectral reconstruction based on a single illuminant. Furthermore, we propose to compute sensor-illuminant aware linear basis by discarding the part of the reflectances that falls in the sensor-illuminant null-space. We show experimentally that optimizing reflectance estimation on these new basis functions decreases the RMSE significantly over basis functions that are independent to sensor-illuminant. We conclude that, multispectral data acquisition is potentially possible with consumer hand-held devices such as tablets, mobiles, and laptops, opening up applications which are currently considered to be unrealistic.

International audience