An evaluation of physically based statistical colour models for image region characterisation

Statistical colour models may be used to characterise regions of interest within images or sequences of images. In this work two types of model, one based on underlying Gaussian statistics and one using a Bingham distribution, are compared on both a theoretical and an experimental level. It is shown that when certain conditions hold, the Bingham model tends to have superior performance but that the performance of the Gaussian model degrades more slowly as these assumptions are relaxed