On the Significance of Real-World Conditions for Material Classification

Classifying materials from their appearance is a challenging problem, especially if illumination and pose conditions are permitted to change: highlights and shadows caused by 3D structure can radically alter a sample's visual texture. Despite these difficulties, researchers have demonstrated impressive results on the CUReT database which contains many images of 61 materials under different conditions. A first contribution of this paper is to further advance the state-of-theart by applying Support Vector Machines to this problem. To our knowledge, we record the best results to date on the CUReT database. In our work we additionally investigate the effect of scale since robustness to viewing distance and zoom settings is crucial in many real-world situations. Indeed, a material's appearance can vary considerably as fine-level detail becomes visible or disappears as the camera moves towards or away from the subject. We handle scale-variations using a pure-learning approach, inco...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ECCV
• Authors: Eric Hayman, Barbara Caputo, Mario Fritz, Jan-Olof Eklundh
• Keywords: Computer Vision, CUReT Database, Database Enable Recognition, ECCV 2004, Little Scale Variation, Pose Conditions, Well-designed Database