Calculate expected color temperature of daylight - colors

I have a location (latitude/longitude) and a timestamp (year/month/day/hour/minute).
Assuming clear skies, is there an algorithm to loosely estimate the color temperature of sunlight at that time and place?
If I know what the weather was at that time, is there a suggested way to modify the color temperature for the amount of cloud cover at that time?

I suggest taking a look at this paper which has nice practical implementation for CG applications:
A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight A. J. Preetham Peter Shirley Brian Smits
Abstract
Sunlight and skylight are rarely rendered correctly in computer
graphics. A major reason for this is high computational expense.
Another is that precise atmospheric data is rarely available. We
present an inexpensive analytic model that approximates full spectrum
daylight for various atmospheric conditions. These conditions are
parameterized using terms that users can either measure or estimate.
We also present an inexpensive analytic model that approximates the
effects of atmosphere (aerial perspective). These models are fielded
in a number of conditions and intermediate results verified against
standard literature from atmospheric science. Our goal is to achieve
as much accuracy as possible without sacrificing usability.
Both compressed postscript and pdf files of the paper are available.
Example code is available.
Color images from the paper are shown below.
Link only answers are discouraged but I can not post neither sufficient portion of the article nor any complete C++ code snippet here as both are way too big. Following the link you can find both right now.

Related

Impulse response analysis

I ran an impulse response analysis on a value weighted stock index and a few variables in python and got the following results:
I am not sure how to interpret these results.
Can anyone please help me out?
You might want to check the book "New introduction to Multiple Time Series Analysis" by Helmut Lutkepohl, 2005, for a slightly dense theory about the method.
In the meantime, a simple way you can interpret your plots is, let's say your variables are VW, SP500, oil, uts, prod, cpi, n3 and usd. They all are parts of the same system; what the impulse response analysis does is, try to assess how much one variable impacts another one independently of the other variables. Therefore, it is a pairwise shock from one variable to another. Your first plot is VW -> VW, this is pretty much an autocorrelation plot. Now, look at the other plots: apparently, SP500 exerts a maximum impact on VW (you can see a peak in the blue line reaching 0.25. The y-axis is given in standard deviations and x-axis in lag-periods. So in your example, SP500 cause a 0.25 change in VW at the lag of whatever is in your x-axis (I can't see from your figure). Similarly, you can see n3 negatively impacting VW at a given period.
There is an interesting link that you probably know and shows an example of the application of Python statsmodels VAR for Impulse Response analysis
I used this method to assess how one variable impact another in a plant-water-atmosphere system, there are some explanations there and also the interpretation of similar plots, take a look:
Use of remote sensing indicators to assess effects of drought and human-induced land degradation on ecosystem health in Northeastern Brazil
Good luck!

Obtaining the Standard Error of Weighted Data in SPSS

I'm trying to find confidence intervals for the means of various variables in a database using SPSS, and I've run into a spot of trouble.
The data is weighted, because each of the people who was surveyed represents a different portion of the overall population. For example, one young man in our sample might represent 28000 young men in the general population. The problem is that SPSS seems to think that the young man's database entries each represent 28000 measurements when they actually just represent one, and this makes SPSS think we have much more data than we actually do. As a result SPSS is giving very very low standard error estimates and very very narrow confidence intervals.
I've tried fixing this by dividing every weight value by the mean weight. This gives plausible figures and an average weight of 1, but I'm not sure the resulting numbers are actually correct.
Is my approach sound? If not, what should I try?
I've been using the Explore command to find mean and standard error (among other things), in case it matters.
You do need to scale weights to the actual sample size, but only the procedures in the Complex Samples option are designed to account for sampling weights properly. The regular weight variable in Statistics is treated as a frequency weight.

How do I measure the distribution of an attribute of a given population?

I have a catalog of 900 applications.
I need to determine how their reliability is distributed as a whole. (i.e. is it normal).
I can measure the reliability of an individual application.
How can I determine the reliability of the group as a whole without measuring each one?
That's a pretty open-ended question! Overall, distribution fitting can be quite challenging and works best with large samples (100's or even 1000's). It's generally better to pick a modeling distribution based on known characteristics of the process you're attempting to model than to try purely empirical fitting.
If you're going to go empirical, for a start you could take a random sample, measure the reliability scores (whatever you're using for that) of your sample, sort them, and plot them vs normal quantiles. If they fall along a relatively straight line the normal distribution is a plausible model, and you can estimate sample mean and variance to parameterize it. You can apply the same idea of plotting vs quantiles from other proposed distributions to see if they are plausible as well.
Watch out for behavior in the tails, in particular. Pretty much by definition the tails occur rarely and may be under-represented in your sample. Like all things statistical, the larger the sample size you can draw on the better your results will be.
I'd also add that my prior belief would be that a normal distribution wouldn't be a great fit. Your reliability scores probably fall on a bounded range, tend to fall more towards one side or the other of that range. If they tend to the high range, I'd predict that they get lopped off at the end of the range and have a long tail to the low side, and vice versa if they tend to the low range.

Image Categorization Using Gist Descriptors

I created a multi-class SVM model using libSVM for categorizing images. I optimized for the C and G parameters using grid search and used the RBF kernel.
The classes are 1) animal 2) floral 3) landscape 4) portrait.
My training set is 100 images from each category, and for each image, I extracted a 920-length vector using Lear's Gist Descriptor C code: http://lear.inrialpes.fr/software.
Upon testing my model on 50 images/category, I achieved ~50% accuracy, which is twice as good as random (25% since there are four classes).
I'm relatively new to computer vision, but familiar with machine learning techniques. Any suggestions on how to improve accuracy effectively?
Thanks so much and I look forward to your responses!
This is very very very open research challenge. And there isn't necessarily a single answer that is theoretically guaranteed to be better.
Given your categories, it's not a bad start though, but keep in mind that Gist was originally designed as a global descriptor for scene classification (albeit has empirically proven useful for other image categories). On the representation side, I recommend trying color-based features like patch-based histograms as well as popular low-level gradient features like SIFT. If you're just beginning to learn about computer vision, then I would say SVM is plenty for what you're doing depending on the variability in your image set, e.g. illumination, view-angle, focus, etc.

Extracting pitch from singing voice

I'd like to extract the pitch from a singing voice. The track in question contains only a single voice and no other sounds.
I want to know the loudness and perceived pitch frequency at a given point in time. So something like the following:
0.0sec 400Hz -20dB
0.1sec 401Hz -9dB
0.2sec 403Hz -10dB
0.3sec 403Hz -10dB
0.4sec 404Hz -11dB
0.5sec 406Hz -13dB
0.6sec 410Hz -15dB
0.7sec 411Hz -16dB
0.8sec 409Hz -20dB
0.9sec 407Hz -24dB
1.0sec 402Hz -34dB
How might I achieve such an output? I'm interested in slight changes in frequency as apposed to a specific note value. I have some DSP knowledge and I can program in C++ and python but I'd like to avoid reinventing the wheel if possible.
Note that slight changes in frequency in Hz and perceived pitch may not be the same thing. Perceived pitch resolution seems to vary with absolute frequency, duration, and loudness. If you want more accuracy than this, there might be some research papers on estimating the time between each glottal closure (probably using a deconvolution or pattern matching technique), which would give you some sort of pitch period. The simplest pitch estimate might be some form of weighted autocorrelation, for which lots of canned algorithms and code is available.
Since dB is log scale, this measure might be somewhat closer to perceived loudness, but has to be spectrally weighted with some perceptual frequency response curve over some duration of measurement.
There seem to be research papers on both of these topics, as well as many textbooks on human audio perception as well as on common audio DSP techniques.
I suggest you read this article
http://audition.ens.fr/adc/pdf/2002_JASA_YIN.pdf
. This is one of the simplest methods of pitch detection, and it works very well.
Also, for measuring the instantaneous power of the signal, you can just take the absolute value of the signal and divide by 1/√2 (Gives the RMS value) and then smooth it (usually a first order low pass filter). I hope this helps. Good luck!

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