Additional comments regarding diagnostic images - JOSS review

[takuma929]

Hi @takuma929 I have revised the manuscript and the toolbox following your suggestions (i.e., added diagnostic plots, reversed the order of the text in the sections summary and the statement, + minor changes). I will mark your comments as closed, but I will be looking forward for new comments.

Hi @RodDalBen thanks for your revision work. I have checked the revised code and manuscript.
My comments were essentially addressed but there are two points that I noticed.

1. Figure 2, on the right side, luminance histograms seems to be completely matched between cat1 and cat2 but slightly different for cat3. Could you check if this really the case?

2. It is great that there is now an option to save diagnostic images. Thanks for implementing this.

However, when I ran the "SHINE_color" with example images "2001-600.jpg", "2002-600.jpg" and "2003-600.jpg" using the default option, I've got two attached images.

In my command window, I've got a message "specMatch successful" and "histMatch successful", but these images show that they don't seem to be matched.. Could you check if luminance histograms and power spectra are properly plotted?

[RodDalBen]

Hi @takuma929,

Thank you for your careful review. I couldn't replicate the error with images "2001-600.jpg", "2002-600.jpg", and "2003-600.jpg". However, your comment prompted me to improve the lum_calc and diag_plots functions. In the previous version, these functions re-read the RGB images from SHINE_color_input and SHINE_color_output folders, transformed it to either HSV or CIELab, and finally computed the summary statistics (lum_calc) or created the diagnostic plots (diag_plots). As you carefully noticed, these transformations introduced some noise and inaccuracy in both the stats summary and the plots. Also, they took some time to run. In the new version, both functions are feed directly with luminance channels that are handled by SHINE functions (e.g., histogram matching) before and after the manipulation, and always before transforming the HSV or CIELab back to RGB. This modification made the functions more accurate and faster.

I updated Figure 2 in the manuscript with the histogram matching for the three cats (I also added the cats pictures in the sample folder). Their post histograms are exactly the same. So are the histograms from "2001-600.jpg", "2002-600.jpg", and "2003-600.jpg", after using the Default option, please see below.

One last comment, when using the Default option, or any other combination of functions, Willenbockel et al. (2010) recommend using multiple iterations to more closely match the manipulated properties.

I will close this issue for now, but I am looking forward for your next comments and suggestions. Thank you, again for your careful reading!