Scene change detection plays an important role in a number of video applications, including video indexing, searching, browsing, semantic features extraction, and, in general, pre-processing and post-processing operations. Several scene change detection methods have been proposed in different coding standards. Most of them use fixed thresholds for the similarity metrics to determine if there wa...

The problem of automatic description of a natural scene is usually divided into two steps: (1) constructing an abstract propositional description of the scene a task carried out by a vision system, and (2) expressing these abstract descriptions in natural language – a task carried out by a naturallanguagesystem. Both of these tasks have been dealt with separately. Systems like MORIO try to solv...

The visual system processes natural scenes in a split second. Part of this process is the extraction of "gist," a global first impression. It is unclear, however, how the human visual system computes this information. Here, we show that, when human observers categorize global information in real-world scenes, the brain exhibits strong sensitivity to low-level summary statistics. Subjects rated ...

Our remarkable ability to process complex visual scenes is supported by a network of scene-selective cortical regions. Despite growing knowledge about the scene representation in these regions, much less is known about the temporal dynamics with which these representations emerge. We conducted two experiments aimed at identifying and characterizing the earliest markers of scene-specific process...

Scene reconstruction, the task of generating a 3D model of a scene given multiple 2D photographs taken of the scene, is an old and difficult problem in computer vision. Since its introduction, scene reconstruction has found application in many fields, including robotics, virtual reality, and entertainment. Volumetric models are a natural choice for scene reconstruction. Three broad classes of v...

The relation of selective attention to understanding of natural scenes has been subject to intense behavioral research and computational modeling, and gaze is often used as a proxy for such attention. The probability of an image region to be fixated typically correlates with its contrast. However, this relation does not imply a causal role of contrast. Rather, contrast may relate to an object's...

This study aimed at assessing the processing time of a natural scene in a fast categorization task of its context or``gist''. In Experiment 1, human subjects performed 4 go/no-go categorization tasks in succession with colour pictures of real-world scenes belonging to 2 natural categories: ``Sea'' and``mountain'', and 2 artificial categories: ``Indoor'' and``urban''. Experiment 2 used colour an...