Reflectance Estimation from Multispectral Linescan Acquisitions under Varying Illumination-Application to Outdoor Weed Identification.

To reduce the amount of herbicides used to eradicate weeds and ensure crop yields, precision spraying can effectively detect and locate weeds in the field thanks to imaging systems. Because weeds are visually similar to crops, color information is not sufficient for effectively detecting them. Multispectral cameras provide radiance images with a high spectral resolution, thus the ability to investigate vegetated surfaces in several narrow spectral bands. Spectral reflectance has to be estimated in order to make weed detection robust against illumination variation. However, this is a challenge when the image is assembled from successive frames that are acquired under varying illumination conditions. In this study, we present an original image formation model that considers illumination variation during radiance image acquisition with a linescan camera. From this model, we deduce a new reflectance estimation method that takes illumination at the frame level into account. We experimentally show that our method is more robust against illumination variation than state-of-the-art methods. We also show that the reflectance features based on our method are more discriminant for outdoor weed detection and identification.

Spatio-spectral binary patterns based on multispectral filter arrays for texture classification.

To discriminate gray-level texture images, spatial texture descriptors can be extracted using the local binary pattern (LBP) operator. This operator has been extended to color images at the expense of increased memory and computation requirements. Some authors propose to compute texture descriptors directly from raw images provided through a Bayer color filter array, which both avoids the demosaicking step and reduces the descriptor size. Recently, multispectral snapshot cameras have emerged to sample more than three wavelength bands using a multispectral filter array. Such cameras provide a raw image in which a single spectral channel value is available at each pixel. In this paper we design a local binary pattern operator that jointly extracts the spatial and spectral texture information directly from a raw image. Extensive experiments on a large dataset show that the proposed descriptor has both reduced computation cost and high discriminative power with regard to classical LBP descriptors applied to demosaicked images.

Fuzzy Color Aura Matrices for Texture Image Segmentation.

Fuzzy gray-level aura matrices have been developed from fuzzy set theory and the aura concept to characterize texture images. They have proven to be powerful descriptors for color texture classification. However, using them for color texture segmentation is difficult because of their high memory and computation requirements. To overcome this problem, we propose to extend fuzzy gray-level aura matrices to fuzzy color aura matrices, which would allow us to apply them to color texture image segmentation. Unlike the marginal approach that requires one fuzzy gray-level aura matrix for each color channel, a single fuzzy color aura matrix is required to locally characterize the interactions between colors of neighboring pixels. Furthermore, all works about fuzzy gray-level aura matrices consider the same neighborhood function for each site. Another contribution of this paper is to define an adaptive neighborhood function based on information about neighboring sites provided by a pre-segmentation method. For this purpose, we propose a modified simple linear iterative clustering algorithm that incorporates a regional feature in order to partition the image into superpixels. All in all, the proposed color texture image segmentation boils down to a superpixel classification using a simple supervised classifier, each superpixel being characterized by a fuzzy color aura matrix. Experimental results on the Prague texture segmentation benchmark show that our method outperforms the classical state-of-the-art supervised segmentation methods and is similar to recent methods based on deep learning.