Biologically Inspired Cartoon Rendering
During my postdoctoral research fellowship at the McGill Vision Research (MVR), I looked into developing an algorithm capable of extracting shading and reflectance (or colour) information from an image.
The first task was to model the responses of the luminance and chromatic channels of the human visual system to an image, and then use these channels to remove the shading information.
The overall idea is that shading appears in the luminance channel (LUM) but not in the chromatic ones, known as red-green (RG) and blue-yellow (BY). The outcome of this research lead to a biologically inspired algorithm able to render cartoon-like images. Overall, this body of work was inspired by the theories of colour and human vision developed by my supervisor Fred Kingdom, and the work on shadow removal by M. F. Tappen, W. Freeman and E. H. Adelson.
Publications
Olmos, A. and Kingdom, F. A. A. (2005), " Automatic non-photorealistic rendering through soft-shading removal: a colour-vision approach ", 2nd International Conference on Vision, Video and Graphics, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2005.
Olmos, A. and Kingdom, F. A. A. (2004), " Biologically inspired recovery of shading and reflectance maps in a single image ", Perception 2004, volume 33, number 12, pages 1463 - 1473, 2004.