Content-based image retrieval using fuzzy perceptual feedback

In this paper, a new framework called fuzzy relevance feedback in interactive content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems is introduced. Conventional binary labeling scheme in relevance feedback requires a crisp decision to be made on the relevance of the retrieved images. However, it is inflexible as user interpretation of visual content varies with respect to different information needs and perceptual subjectivity. In addition, users tend to learn from the retrieval results to further refine their information requests. It is, therefore, inadequate to describe the user’s fuzzy perception of image similarity with crisp logic. In view of this, we propose a fuzzy relevance feedback approach which enables the user to make a fuzzy judgement. It integrates the user’s fuzzy interpretation of visual content into the notion of relevance feedback. An efficient learning approach is proposed using a fuzzy radial basis function (FRBF) network. The network is constructed based on the user’s feedbacks. The underlying network parameters are optimized by adopting a gradient-descent training strategy due to its computational efficiency. Experimental results using a database of 10,000 images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Content-based image retrieval using extroverted semantics: a probabilistic approach

This paper presents a novel content-based image retrieval technique based on Gaussian mixture probability model. The proposed technique provides the solution toward matching arbitrary images based on color, shape and texture. Glyph structure of the image, which inclines on the shape and texture attributes, is modeled and used for content matching. Gaussian mixture model is applied to quantify the glyph structure in terms of its parameters. The formed probability density functions based on the glyph structure are refined using expectation maximization. Finally, the parameters yielded by the Gaussian mixture model allow us to perform comparison between arbitrary images based on their semantic details. It is concluded from the experimental results that relatively similar images have comparable parameters while the parameters of discordant images deviate with each other. In this way, for a certain arbitrary image, the set of resembling images is obtained from a large image base. In addition, the results show that this set is narrowed or broadened on the basis of a divergence ratio which marks the functional difference between the parameters of the images being compared.     

Content-based image retrieval methods

Creation of a content-based image retrieval system implies solving a number of difficult problems, including analysis of low-level image features and construction of feature vectors, multidimensional indexing, design of user interface, and data visualization. Quality of a retrieval system depends, first of all, on the feature vectors used, which describe image content. The paper presents a survey of common feature extraction and representation techniques and metrics of the corresponding feature spaces. Color, texture, and shape features are considered. A detailed classification of the currently known features’ representations is given. Experimental results on efficiency comparison of various methods for representing and comparing image content as applied to the retrieval and classification tasks are presented.     

基于内容的图像检索技术与医学图像检索

在分析基于内容的图像检索技术特点的基础上,提出了4种基于内容的图像检索方法,并对每种方法的实现特别是特征抽取进行了一定的研究。根据医学图像的使用特点,对基于内容的医学图像检索技术进行了初步的研究;对医学图像特征的抽取,应将重点放在形状特征和纹理特征的抽取上;同时,对医学图像进行检索,还可以使用颜色空间分布特征,来进一步进行相似匹配。     

Content-based image retrieval using joint correlograms

The comparison of digital images to determine their degree of similarity is one of the fundamental problems of computer vision. Many techniques exist which accomplish this with a certain level of success, most of which involve either the analysis of pixel-level features or the segmentation of images into sub-objects that can be geometrically compared. In this paper we develop and evaluate a new variation of the pixel feature and analysis technique known as the color correlogram in the context of a content-based image retrieval system. Our approach is to extend the autocorrelogram by adding multiple image features in addition to color. We compare the performance of each index scheme with our method for image retrieval on a large database of images. The experiment shows that our proposed method gives a significant improvement over histogram or color correlogram indexing, and it is also memory-efficient.

Content-based image retrieval approach for biometric security using colour,texture and shape features controlled by fuzzy heuristics

In this paper, we discuss a new content-based image retrieval approach for biometric security, which is based on colour, texture and shape features and controlled by fuzzy heuristics. The proposed approach is based on the three well-known algorithms: colour histogram, texture and moment invariants. The use of these three algorithms ensures that the proposed image retrieval approach produces results which are highly relevant to the content of an image query, by taking into account the three distinct features of the image and similarity metrics based on Euclidean measure. Colour histogram is used to extract the colour features of an image. Gabor filter is used to extract the texture features and the moment invariant is used to extract the shape features of an image. The evaluation of the proposed approach is carried out using the standard precision and recall measures, and the results are compared with the well-known existing approaches. We present results which show that our proposed approach performs better than these approaches.     

Content-based facial image retrieval using common vector

Abstract： Facial image retrieval is an essential application of content-based image retrieval. Based on the analysis of the practical application background, this paper proposes a new facial image retrieval scheme. In this scheme, the input query image is firstly transformed by four different methods to generate virtual samples and enlarge the training set. Moreover common vector method is applied to span the feature space for the training set whose images just belong to one class. To prove the feasibility of the scheme, a series of experiments are performed on the ORL face database.     

Content-based image retrieval by hierarchical linear subspace method

We describe a hierarchical linear subspace method to query large on-line image databases using image similarity as the basis of the queries. The method is based on the generic multimedia indexing (GEMINI) approach which is used in the IBM query through the image content search system. Our approach is demonstrated on image indexing, in which the subspaces correspond to different resolutions of the images. During content-based image retrieval, the search starts in the subspace with the lowest resolution of the images. In this subspace, the set of all possible similar images is determined. In the next subspace, additional metric information corresponding to a higher resolution is used to reduce this set. This procedure is repeated until the similar images can be determined. For evaluation we used three image databases and two different subspace sequences.     

.NET环境下基于图像内容智能检索的研究

计算机信息技术的发展,图像数据的无序激增,人们面临如何在大量的图像中查找有用信息的问题,于是图像检索技术成为研究热点.而目前的图像检索技术主要有基于关键字查询和基于图像内容查询两种方式,他们都存在或多或少的缺点,不是过于主观就是过于客观,不能很好的满足人们的需求.为了弥补他们的缺点,更好的解决图像检索问题,提出了一种基于内容的图像智能检索方案,在基于内容的图像检索的基础上结合人工智能的推理机制,利用智能推理的优势来改善检索效果,实践证明文中所述的方法是有效的.     

Content-based image retrieval with the normalized information distance

The main idea of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is to search on an image’s visual content directly. Typically, features (e.g., color, shape, texture) are extracted from each image and organized into a feature vector. Retrieval is performed by image example where a query image is given as input by the user and an appropriate metric is used to find the best matches in the corresponding feature space. We attempt to bypass the feature selection step (and the metric in the corresponding feature space) by following what we believe is the logical continuation of the CBIR idea of searching visual content directly. It is based on the observation that, since ultimately, the entire visual content of an image is encoded into its raw data (i.e., the raw pixel values), in theory, it should be possible to determine image similarity based on the raw data alone. The main advantage of this approach is its simplicity in that explicit selection, extraction, and weighting of features is not needed. This work is an investigation into an image dissimilarity measure following from the theoretical foundation of the recently proposed normalized information distance (NID) [M. Li, X. Chen, X. Li, B. Ma, P. Vitányi, The similarity metric, in: Proceedings of the 14th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 2003, pp. 863–872]. Approximations of the Kolmogorov complexity of an image are created by using different compression methods. Using those approximations, the NID between images is calculated and used as a metric for CBIR. The compression-based approximations to Kolmogorov complexity are shown to be valid by proving that they create statistically significant dissimilarity measures by testing them against a null hypothesis of random retrieval. Furthermore, when compared against several feature-based methods, the NID approach performed surprisingly well.     

一种基于Curvelet相关图纹理图像检索方法

纹理是图像普遍存在且难以描述的特征,但是更容易引起人们视觉上的关注,它蕴含有丰富的信息,所以基于纹理的检索具有重要的应用价值。提出了一种新的基于Curvelet相关图纹理图像检索方法。该方法通过对纹理图像进行Curvelet分解进行多尺度分析;利用变换后粗尺度反映图像轮廓、细尺度反映图像纹理信息特性,阈值处理后采用不同的量化等级;计算Curvelet系数相关图,反映了不同系数所占比例和相互之间的空间相关性,由此构造图像的特征向量。通过对Brodatz纹理图像库实验,结果表明该方法相较于原有的Curvelet方法能够更有效地进行纹理图像检索。     

FReBIR: An image retrieval system based on fuzzy region matching

In this paper, we present a method of image indexing and retrieval which takes into account the relative positions of the regions within the image. Indexing is based on a segmentation of the image into fuzzy regions; we propose an algorithm which produces a fuzzy segmentation. The image retrieval is based on inexact graph matching, taking into account both the similarity between regions and the spatial relation between them. We propose, on one hand a solution to reduce the combinatorial complexity of the graph matching, and on the other hand, a measure of similarity between graphs allowing the result images ranking. A relevance feedback process based on region classifiers allows then a good generalization to a large variety of the regions. The method is adapted to partial queries, aiming for example at retrieving images containing a specific type of object. Applications may be of two types, firstly an on-line search from a partial query, with a relevance feedback aiming at interactively leading the search, and secondly an off-line learning of categories from a set of examples of the object. The name of the system is FReBIR for Fuzzy Region-Based Image Retrieval.     

Content-based image retrieval algorithm acceleration in a low-cost reconfigurable FPGA cluster

The SMILE project main aim is to build an efficient low-cost cluster based on FPGA boards in order to take advantage of its reconfigurable capabilities. This paper shows the cluster architecture, describing: the SMILE nodes, the high-speed communication network for the nodes and the software environment. Simulating complex applications can be very hard, therefore a SystemC model of the whole system has been designed to simplify this task and provide error-free downloading and execution of the applications in the cluster. The hardware–software co-design process involved in the architecture and SystemC design is presented as well. The SMILE cluster functionality is tested executing a real complex Content-Based Information Retrieval (CBIR) parallel application and the performance of the cluster is compared (time, power and cost) with a traditional cluster approach.     

Content-based image retrieval with relevance feedback using random walks

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to content-based image retrieval with relevance feedback, which is based on the random walker algorithm introduced in the context of interactive image segmentation. The idea is to treat the relevant and non-relevant images labeled by the user at every feedback round as “seed” nodes for the random walker problem. The ranking score for each unlabeled image is computed as the probability that a random walker starting from that image will reach a relevant seed before encountering a non-relevant one. Our method is easy to implement, parameter-free and scales well to large datasets. Extensive experiments on different real datasets with several image similarity measures show the superiority of our method over different recent approaches.     

Content-based facial image retrieval using constrained independent component analysis

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a method of searching, browsing, and querying images according to their content. In this paper, we focus on a specific domain of CBIR that involves the development of a content-based facial image retrieval system based on the constrained independent component analysis (cICA). Originating from independent component analysis (ICA), cICA is a source separation technique that uses priori constraints to extract desired independent components (ICs) from data. By providing query images as the constraints to the cICA, the ICs that share similar probabilistic features with the queries from the database can be extracted. Then, these extracted ICs are used to evaluate the rank of each image according to the query. In our approach, we demonstrate that, in addition to a single image-based query, a compound query with multiple query images can be used to search for images with compounding feature content. The experimental results of our CBIR system tested with different facial databases show that our system can improve retrieval performance by using a compound query. Furthermore, our system allows for online processing without the need to learn query images.     

Content-based image retrieval using growing hierarchical self-organizing quadtree map

In this paper, a growing hierarchical self-organizing quadtree map (GHSOQM) is proposed and used for a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system. The incorporation of GHSOQM in a CBIR system organizes images in a hierarchical structure. The retrieval time by GHSOQM is less than that by using direct image comparison using a flat structure. Furthermore, the ability of incremental learning enables GHSOQM to be a prospective neural-network-based approach for CBIR systems. We also propose feature matrices, image distance and relevance feedback for region-based images in the GHSOQM-based CBIR system. Experimental results strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.