Patent ID: 8600169

Claim:
An automated, computerized method for processing an image, comprising the steps of: providing an image file depicting an image, in a computer memory; identifying a set of indicia measuring one of similarities and dissimilarities for selected pairs of regions of the image; transforming similarity and dissimilarity information derived from the set to pairwise distances; performing a clustering operation as a function of the pairwise distances to identify clusters; defining same intrinsic characteristic constraints as a function of the clusters; and performing an optimization operation as a function of the constraints to generate intrinsic images corresponding to the image, the intrinsic images each comprising a representation of one of material or illumination, expressed as a separate, multi-band representation for the one of material or illumination, independent of the other of the material or illumination, wherein each band corresponds to a segment of the electro-magnetic spectrum, such that when the intrinsic image comprises an illumination image, the illumination image captures the intensity and color of light incident upon each point on the surfaces depicted in the image, and when the intrinsic image comprises a material image, the material image captures reflectance properties of surfaces depicted in the image, including the percentage of each wavelength of light a surface reflects, to segregate the image into intrinsic material reflectance and illumination components.