A framework for medical image retrieval using machine learning and statistical similarity matching techniques with relevance feedback.

A content-based image retrieval (CBIR) framework for diverse collection of medical images of different imaging modalities, anatomic regions with different orientations and biological systems is proposed. Organization of images in such a database (DB) is well defined with predefined semantic categories; hence, it can be useful for category-specific searching. The proposed framework consists of machine learning methods for image prefiltering, similarity matching using statistical distance measures, and a relevance feedback (RF) scheme. To narrow down the semantic gap and increase the retrieval efficiency, we investigate both supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to associate low-level global image features (e.g., color, texture, and edge) in the projected PCA-based eigenspace with their high-level semantic and visual categories. Specially, we explore the use of a probabilistic multiclass support vector machine (SVM) and fuzzy c-mean (FCM) clustering for categorization and prefiltering of images to reduce the search space. A category-specific statistical similarity matching is proposed in a finer level on the prefiltered images. To incorporate a better perception subjectivity, an RF mechanism is also added to update the query parameters dynamically and adjust the proposed matching functions. Experiments are based on a ground-truth DB consisting of 5000 diverse medical images of 20 predefined categories. Analysis of results based on cross-validation (CV) accuracy and precision-recall for image categorization and retrieval is reported. It demonstrates the improvement, effectiveness, and efficiency achieved by the proposed framework.     

Semantic content-based image retrieval: A comprehensive study

The complexity of multimedia contents is significantly increasing in the current digital world. This yields an exigent demand for developing highly effective retrieval systems to satisfy human needs. Recently, extensive research efforts have been presented and conducted in the field of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). The majority of these efforts have been concentrated on reducing the semantic gap that exists between low-level image features represented by digital machines and the profusion of high-level human perception used to perceive images. Based on the growing research in the recent years, this paper provides a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art in the field of CBIR. Additionally, this study presents a detailed overview of the CBIR framework and improvements achieved; including image preprocessing, feature extraction and indexing, system learning, benchmarking datasets, similarity matching, relevance feedback, performance evaluation, and visualization. Finally, promising research trends, challenges, and our insights are provided to inspire further research efforts.     

Boosting image object retrieval and indexing by automatically discovered pseudo-objects

State-of-the-art object retrieval systems are mostly based on the bag-of-visual-words representation which encodes local appearance information of an image in a feature vector. An image object search is performed by comparing query object’s feature vector with those for database images. However, a database image vector generally carries mixed information of the entire image which may contain multiple objects and background. Search quality is degraded by such noisy (or diluted) feature vectors. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel representation, pseudo-objects – a subset of proximate feature points with its own feature vector to represent a local area, to approximate candidate objects in database images. In this paper, we investigate effective methods (e.g., grid, G-means, and GMM–BIC) to estimate pseudo-objects. Additionally, we also confirm that the pseudo-objects can significantly benefit inverted-file indexing both in accuracy and efficiency. Experimenting over two consumer photo benchmarks, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art object retrieval and indexing algorithms.     

基于内容图像分类技术中的特征分析

论文介绍了基于内容的图像检索技术(CBIR)的研究现状和相关技术,其中,特征提取是整个图像分类的关键,色彩和纹理都是CBIR常用到的图像视觉特征。文中提取了图像的颜色和纹理等六种特征．将所有的特征向量进行相应的组合,并采用SVM进行分类。最后,作者通过分析不同特征组合的识别效果,揭示了各种特征之间的内在联系,进而得到图像分类中的最佳特征组合。     

Similarity-based online feature selection in content-based image retrieval.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been more and more important in the last decade, and the gap between high-level semantic concepts and low-level visual features hinders further performance improvement. The problem of online feature selection is critical to really bridge this gap. In this paper, we investigate online feature selection in the relevance feedback learning process to improve the retrieval performance of the region-based image retrieval system. Our contributions are mainly in three areas. 1) A novel feature selection criterion is proposed, which is based on the psychological similarity between the positive and negative training sets. 2) An effective online feature selection algorithm is implemented in a boosting manner to select the most representative features for the current query concept and combine classifiers constructed over the selected features to retrieve images. 3) To apply the proposed feature selection method in region-based image retrieval systems, we propose a novel region-based representation to describe images in a uniform feature space with real-valued fuzzy features. Our system is suitable for online relevance feedback learning in CBIR by meeting the three requirements: learning with small size training set, the intrinsic asymmetry property of training samples, and the fast response requirement. Extensive experiments, including comparisons with many state-of-the-arts, show the effectiveness of our algorithm in improving the retrieval performance and saving the processing time.     

CLUE: cluster-based retrieval of images by unsupervised learning.

In a typical content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system, target images (images in the database) are sorted by feature similarities with respect to the query. Similarities among target images are usually ignored. This paper introduces a new technique, cluster-based retrieval of images by unsupervised learning (CLUE), for improving user interaction with image retrieval systems by fully exploiting the similarity information. CLUE retrieves image clusters by applying a graph-theoretic clustering algorithm to a collection of images in the vicinity of the query. Clustering in CLUE is dynamic. In particular, clusters formed depend on which images are retrieved in response to the query. CLUE can be combined with any real-valued symmetric similarity measure (metric or nonmetric). Thus, it may be embedded in many current CBIR systems, including relevance feedback systems. The performance of an experimental image retrieval system using CLUE is evaluated on a database of around 60,000 images from COREL. Empirical results demonstrate improved performance compared with a CBIR system using the same image similarity measure. In addition, results on images returned by Google's Image Search reveal the potential of applying CLUE to real-world image data and integrating CLUE as a part of the interface for keyword-based image retrieval systems.     

一种新的图像检索方法

常规基于内容图像检索的方法是提取图像的颜色、纹理等物理特征,运用相似性度量准则从图像库中查询相似的图像。为了提高图像检索的正确率,这里提出改进的方法。具体方法是:提取图像的物理特征,并将特征作为支持向量机(SVM)的输入向量,对图像进行分类,然后利用分类结果,对检索图像进行相似性匹配,从同类图像中找出相似的图像。实验结果显示,该方法的检索结果优于常规方法。     

A novel steganalysis framework of heterogeneous images based on GMM clustering

The current steganalysis frameworks involve a large number of techniques for feature extraction and classification. However, one of their common defects is treating all images as equal, thus ignoring the variability of statistical properties of different images, which motivates us to propose a novel steganalysis framework based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering in the study, targeting at heterogeneous images with different texture complexity. There are two main improvements compared to the current steganalysis frameworks. First, in the training stage, the GMM clustering algorithm is exploited to classify the training samples into limited categories automatically, and then design corresponding steganalyzers for each category; second, in the testing stage, the posterior probability of testing samples belonging to each category is calculated, and the samples are submitted to the steganalyzers corresponding to the maximum posterior probability for test. Extensive experimental results aiming at least significant bit matching (LSBM) steganography and two adaptive steganography algorithms show that the proposed framework outperforms the steganalysis system that is directly trained on a mixed dataset, and also indicate that our framework exhibits better detection performance compared to the representative framework for using image contents in most circumstances and similar detection performance in few cases.     

A new way for multidimensional medical data management: volume of interest (VOI)-based retrieval of medical images with visual and functional features.

The advances in digital medical imaging and storage in integrated databases are resulting in growing demands for efficient image retrieval and management. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) refers to the retrieval of images from a database, using the visual features derived from the information in the image, and has become an attractive approach to managing large medical image archives. In conventional CBIR systems for medical images, images are often segmented into regions which are used to derive two-dimensional visual features for region-based queries. Although such approach has the advantage of including only relevant regions in the formulation of a query, medical images that are inherently multidimensional can potentially benefit from the multidimensional feature extraction which could open up new opportunities in visual feature extraction and retrieval. In this study, we present a volume of interest (VOI) based content-based retrieval of four-dimensional (three spatial and one temporal) dynamic PET images. By segmenting the images into VOIs consisting of functionally similar voxels (e.g., a tumor structure), multidimensional visual and functional features were extracted and used as region-based query features. A prototype VOI-based functional image retrieval system (VOI-FIRS) has been designed to demonstrate the proposed multidimensional feature extraction and retrieval. Experimental results show that the proposed system allows for the retrieval of related images that constitute similar visual and functional VOI features, and can find potential applications in medical data management, such as to aid in education, diagnosis, and statistical analysis.     

Integration of wavelet transform,Local Binary Patterns and moments for content-based image retrieval

The proliferation of large number of images has made it necessary to develop systems for indexing and organizing images for easy access. This has made Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) an important area of research in Computer Vision. This paper proposes a combination of features in multiresolution analysis framework for image retrieval. In this work, the concept of multiresolution analysis has been exploited through the use of wavelet transform. This paper combines Local Binary Pattern (LBP) with Legendre Moments at multiple resolutions of wavelet decomposition of image. First, LBP codes of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) coefficients of images are computed to extract texture feature from image. The Legendre Moments of these LBP codes are then computed to extract shape feature from texture feature for constructing feature vectors. These feature vectors are used to search and retrieve visually similar images from large database. The proposed method has been tested on five benchmark datasets, namely, Corel-1K, Olivia-2688, Corel-5K, Corel-10K, and GHIM-10K, and performance of the proposed method has been measured in terms of precision and recall. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms some of the other state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision and recall.     

Contextual aerial image categorization using codebook

Effective categorization of the millions of aerial images from unmanned planes is a useful technique with several important applications. Previous methods on this task usually encountered such problems: (1) it is hard to represent the aerial images’ topologies efficiently, which are the key feature to distinguish the arial images rather than conventional appearance, and (2) the computational load is usually too high to build a realtime image categorization system. Addressing these problems, this paper proposes an efficient and effective aerial image categorization method based on a contextual topological codebook. The codebook of aerial images is learned with a multitask learning framework. The topology of each aerial image is represented with the region adjacency graph (RAG). Furthermore, a codebook containing topologies is learned by jointly modeling the contextual information, based on the extracted discriminative graphlets. These graphlets are integrated into a Bag-of-Words (BoW) representation for predicting aerial image categories. Contextual relation among local patches are taken into account in categorization to yield high categorization performance. Experimental results show that our approach is both effective and efficient.     

A similarity learning approach to content-based image retrieval: application to digital mammography

In this paper, we describe an approach to content-based retrieval of medical images from a database, and provide a preliminary demonstration of our approach as applied to retrieval of digital mammograms. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) refers to the retrieval of images from a database using information derived from the images themselves, rather than solely from accompanying text indices. In the medical-imaging context, the ultimate aim of CBIR is to provide radiologists with a diagnostic aid in the form of a display of relevant past cases, along with proven pathology and other suitable information. CBIR may also be useful as a training tool for medical students and residents. The goal of information retrieval is to recall from a database information that is relevant to the user's query. The most challenging aspect of CBIR is the definition of relevance (similarity), which is used to guide the retrieval machine. In this paper, we pursue a new approach, in which similarity is learned from training examples provided by human observers. Specifically, we explore the use of neural networks and support vector machines to predict the user's notion of similarity. Within this framework we propose using a hierarchal learning approach, which consists of a cascade of a binary classifier and a regression module to optimize retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. We also explore how to incorporate online human interaction to achieve relevance feedback in this learning framework. Our experiments are based on a database consisting of 76 mammograms, all of which contain clustered microcalcifications (MCs). Our goal is to retrieve mammogram images containing similar MC clusters to that in a query. The performance of the retrieval system is evaluated using precision-recall curves computed using a cross-validation procedure. Our experimental results demonstrate that: 1) the learning framework can accurately predict the perceptual similarity reported by human observers, thereby serving as a basis for CBIR; 2) the learning-based framework can significantly outperform a simple distance-based similarity metric; 3) the use of the hierarchical two-stage network can improve retrieval performance; and 4) relevance feedback can be effectively incorporated into this learning framework to achieve improvement in retrieval precision based on online interaction with users; and 5) the retrieved images by the network can have predicting value for the disease condition of the query.     

基于深度卷积神经网络和二进制哈希学习的图像检索方法

随着图像数据的迅猛增长,当前主流的图像检索方法采用的视觉特征编码步骤固定,缺少学习能力,导致其图像表达能力不强,而且视觉特征维数较高,严重制约了其图像检索性能。针对这些问题,该文提出一种基于深度卷积神径网络学习二进制哈希编码的方法,用于大规模的图像检索。该文的基本思想是在深度学习框架中增加一个哈希层,同时学习图像特征和哈希函数,且哈希函数满足独立性和量化误差最小的约束。首先,利用卷积神经网络强大的学习能力挖掘训练图像的内在隐含关系,提取图像深层特征,增强图像特征的区分性和表达能力。然后,将图像特征输入到哈希层,学习哈希函数使得哈希层输出的二进制哈希码分类误差和量化误差最小,且满足独立性约束。最后,给定输入图像通过该框架的哈希层得到相应的哈希码,从而可以在低维汉明空间中完成对大规模图像数据的有效检索。在3个常用数据集上的实验结果表明,利用所提方法得到哈希码,其图像检索性能优于当前主流方法。     

Active learning methods for interactive image retrieval.

Active learning methods have been considered with increased interest in the statistical learning community. Initially developed within a classification framework, a lot of extensions are now being proposed to handle multimedia applications. This paper provides algorithms within a statistical framework to extend active learning for online content-based image retrieval (CBIR). The classification framework is presented with experiments to compare several powerful classification techniques in this information retrieval context. Focusing on interactive methods, active learning strategy is then described. The limitations of this approach for CBIR are emphasized before presenting our new active selection process RETIN. First, as any active method is sensitive to the boundary estimation between classes, the RETIN strategy carries out a boundary correction to make the retrieval process more robust. Second, the criterion of generalization error to optimize the active learning selection is modified to better represent the CBIR objective of database ranking. Third, a batch processing of images is proposed. Our strategy leads to a fast and efficient active learning scheme to retrieve sets of online images (query concept). Experiments on large databases show that the RETIN method performs well in comparison to several other active strategies.     

Efficient Cloud Image Retrieval System Using Weighted-Inverted Index and Database Filtering Algorithms

With the advance of multimedia technology and communications, images and videos become the major streaming information through the Internet. How to fast retrieve desired similar images precisely from the Internet scale image/video databases is the most important retrieval control target. In this paper, a cloud based content-based image retrieval (CBIR) scheme is presented. Database-categorizing based on weighted-inverted index (DCWⅡ) and database filtering algorithm (DFA) is used to speed up the features matching process. In the DCWⅡ, the weights are assigned to discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients histograms and the database is categorized by weighted features. In addition, the DFA filters out the irrelevant image in the database to reduce unnecessary computation loading for features matching. Experiments show that the proposed CBIR scheme outperforms previous work in the precision-recall performance and maintains mean average precision (mAP) about 0.678 in the large-scale database comprising one million images. Our scheme also can reduce about 50% to 85% retrieval time by pre-filtering the database, which helps to improve the efficiency of retrieval systems.     

一种基于区域的动态分块图象检索方法

本文提出一种新颖的基于内容和图像检索方法，基于运动子块分割并根据视觉特性对不同区域做不同的加权，比较各子块相似度，分析相似度矩阵，并检索查询物体。通过将图象分割细化，充分利用了原图的颜色位置信息，通过实验，实现了对特定物体进行检索。该物体检索方法可进一步发展，为特定的后续处理奠定基础，如在人脸识别等功能中发挥重要作用。     

Fusing integrated visual vocabularies-based bag of visual words and weighted colour moments on spatial pyramid layout for natural scene image classification

The bag of visual words (BOW) model is an efficient image representation technique for image categorization and annotation tasks. Building good visual vocabularies, from automatically extracted image feature vectors, produces discriminative visual words, which can improve the accuracy of image categorization tasks. Most approaches that use the BOW model in categorizing images ignore useful information that can be obtained from image classes to build visual vocabularies. Moreover, most BOW models use intensity features extracted from local regions and disregard colour information, which is an important characteristic of any natural scene image. In this paper, we show that integrating visual vocabularies generated from each image category improves the BOW image representation and improves accuracy in natural scene image classification. We use a keypoint density-based weighting method to combine the BOW representation with image colour information on a spatial pyramid layout. In addition, we show that visual vocabularies generated from training images of one scene image dataset can plausibly represent another scene image dataset on the same domain. This helps in reducing time and effort needed to build new visual vocabularies. The proposed approach is evaluated over three well-known scene classification datasets with 6, 8 and 15 scene categories, respectively, using 10-fold cross-validation. The experimental results, using support vector machines with histogram intersection kernel, show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as Gist features, rgbSIFT features and different configurations of the BOW model.     

基才高维局部特征和LSH索引的图像检索技术

基于内容的图像检索（CBIR）技术使从海量图像资源中快速高效地提取有价值的信息得以实现,采用局部特征来表示图像并在此基础上进行图像相似性检索是当前的热门研究课题。文中将图像高维局部不变特征提取算法和LSH索引算法应用到基于内容的图像检索系统中,实验结果表明了该方法的有效性。     

Intermediate Annotationless Dynamical Object-Index-Based Query in Large Image Archives with Holographic Representation

This paper presents a new parallel and distributed associative network-based technique for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) with dynamic indices. Unlike any prior artificial associative networks (AAM), this new associative search network has the unique ability to explicitly focus on any subset of pixels in the image. It can also provide a feedback meta-quantity on the quality of outgoing information. The network is founded on a bi-modal representation of information elements which in addition to basic information also includes meta-states. Its computational model has been derived from optical holography. These unique capabilities coupled with usual advantages of associative computing (adaptability, efficiency, ability to cope with imprecision, parallel and distributed mode of computation) now for the first time make it possible to realize a CBIR technique based on associative computing. This new CBIR strategy provides an inquirer greater flexibility to independently and dynamically construct object-indices without depending on the fixed, predefined ad hoc indices used by traditional CBIR approaches. The paper presents the mechanism, architecture, and performance of an image archival and retrieval system realized with this new network.     

A CBIR system based on saliency driven local image features and multi orientation texture features

In Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR), the user provides the query image in which only a selective portion of the image carries the foremost vital information known as the object region of the image. However, the human visual system also focuses on a particular salient region of an image to instinctively understand its semantic meaning. Therefore, the human visual attention technique can be well imposed in the CBIR scheme. Inspired by these facts, we initially utilized the signature saliency map-based approach to decompose the image into its respective main object region (ObR) and non-object region (NObR). ObR possesses most of the vital image information, so block-level normalized singular value decomposition (SVD) has been used to extract salient features of the ObR. In most natural images, NObR plays a significant role in understanding the actual semantic meaning of the image. Accordingly, multi-directional texture features have been extracted from NObR using Gabor filter on different wavelengths. Since the importance of ObR and NObR features are not equal, a new homogeneity-based similarity matching approach has been devised to enhance retrieval accuracy. Finally, we have demonstrated retrieval performances using both the combined and distinct ObR and NObR features on seven standard coral, texture, object, and heterogeneous datasets. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed CBIR system has a promising retrieval efficiency and outperforms various existing systems substantially.