Photometric Invariant Region Detection

In this paper, we concentrate on determining homogeneously colored regions invariant to surface orientation change, illumination, shadows and highlights. To this end, the influence of various well-known color models (e.g. , , , , , , , and ) are examined, in theory, for the dichromatic reflection model and, in practice, for two distinct region-based segmentation methods: the k-means clustering technique and the split&merge algorithm. Experiments are conducted on color images taken from colored objects in real-world scenes. On the basis of the theoretical and experimental results it is concluded that , , , , and all detect regions invariant to a change in surface orientation, viewpoint of the camera, and illumination intensity. Furthermore, and also detect regions independent of highlights. , , , , ,a nd provide segmentation results which are all sensitive to surface orientation and illumination intensity as well as color models incorporating brightness into their systems: in , in ,a nd in .