This Research Initiation Award will permit Dr. Healey to study the physics of color image formation and the use of physical models in segmenting and analyzing color imagery. Highlight grouping and clustering of normalized colors will be used in new algorithms for color edge detection, segmentation, and material identification. Image sensors will also be modeled, and high- speed implementations will be studied. This work may be particularly important in industrial inspection tasks, where color information can compensate for uncalibrated illumination changes and poor or varying sensor optics.
