METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR REPRESENTING COLORED SURFACES VIA A SURFACE COLOR CODE BOOK

Colored surfaces are represented in an illumination-invariant and pose-invariant manner through a color code book. Patches of each color surface are represented, under well-chosen illumination conditions and other imaging variations, as clusters in an optimal color space. For each surface, the color code book entries represent its clusters' means, covariance matrices, eigen values and eigen vectors. In addition, a corresponding semantic label is given to each surface's color code book entry to simplify image processing operations such as region localization and recognition as well as indexing and querying of image databases.