一种基于灰度共生矩阵的云图检索方法

卫星云图检索可帮助气象预报人员快速定位历史相似天气．根据云图纹理特征区分度较大的特点提出一种采用纹理特征对卫星云图进行相似性检索的方法。针时找到一个普遍适用的纹理特征非常困难的问题．提出一种根据特征值的方差分布情况从大量备选特征中快速找出适合某类图像检索所需的纹理特征值的方法,并以灰度共生矩阵的特征值提取为例．对卫星云图进行相似性检索。检索流程为：首先对云图进行云地分离的预处理．然后从云图的灰度共生矩阵中提取有效的检索特征生成特征值．并与历史云图库对应的特征库进行相似距离计算．最后根据距离的排序顺序输出最终的检索结果。实验表明．该方法能有效地从历史云图库中检索出具有相似视觉特征的云图．说明该方法可以用于卫星云图的相似性检索。     

Utilizing similarity relationships among existing data for high accuracy processing of content-based image retrieval

Retrieving similar images based on its visual content is an important yet difficult problem. We propose in this paper a new method to improve the accuracy of content-based image retrieval systems. Typically, given a query image, existing retrieval methods return a ranked list based on the similarity scores between the query and individual images in the database. Our method goes further by relying on an analysis of the underlying connections among individual images in the database to improve this list. Initially, we consider each image in the database as a query and use an existing baseline method to search for its likely similar images. Then, the database is modeled as a graph where images are nodes and connections among possibly similar images are edges. Next, we introduce an algorithm to split this graph into stronger subgraphs, based on our notion of graph’s strength, so that images in each subgraph are expected to be truly similar to each other. We create for each subgraph a structure called integrated image which contains the visual features of all images in the subgraph. At query time, we compute the similarity scores not only between the query and individual database images but also between the query and the integrated images. The final similarity score of a database image is computed based on both its individual score and the score of the integrated image that it belongs to. This leads effectively to a re-ranking of the retrieved images. We evaluate our method on a common image retrieval benchmark and demonstrate a significant improvement over the traditional bag-of-words retrieval model.     

Featured correspondence topic model for semantic search on social image collections

Nowadays, due to the rapid growth of digital technologies, huge volumes of image data are created and shared on social media sites. User-provided tags attached to each social image are widely recognized as a bridge to fill the semantic gap between low-level image features and high-level concepts. Hence, a combination of images along with their corresponding tags is useful for intelligent retrieval systems, those are designed to gain high-level understanding from images and facilitate semantic search. However, user-provided tags in practice are usually incomplete and noisy, which may degrade the retrieval performance. To tackle this problem, we present a novel retrieval framework that automatically associates the visual content with textual tags and enables effective image search. To this end, we first propose a probabilistic topic model learned on social images to discover latent topics from the co-occurrence of tags and image features. Moreover, our topic model is built by exploiting the expert knowledge about the correlation between tags with visual contents and the relationship among image features that is formulated in terms of spatial location and color distribution. The discovered topics then help to predict missing tags of an unseen image as well as the ones partially labeled in the database. These predicted tags can greatly facilitate the reliable measure of semantic similarity between the query and database images. Therefore, we further present a scoring scheme to estimate the similarity by fusing textual tags and visual representation. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show that our topic model provides the accurate annotation against the noise and incompleteness of tags. Using our generalized scoring scheme, which is particularly advantageous to many types of queries, the proposed approach also outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of retrieval accuracy.     

Relevance Feedback and Learning in Content-Based Image Search

A major bottleneck in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems or search engines is the large gap between low-level image features used to index images and high-level semantic contents of images. One solution to this bottleneck is to apply relevance feedback to refine the query or similarity measures in image search process. In this paper, we first address the key issues involved in relevance feedback of CBIR systems and present a brief overview of a set of commonly used relevance feedback algorithms. Almost all of the previously proposed methods fall well into such framework. We present a framework of relevance feedback and semantic learning in CBIR. In this framework, low-level features and keyword annotations are integrated in image retrieval and in feedback processes to improve the retrieval performance. We have also extended framework to a content-based web image search engine in which hosting web pages are used to collect relevant annotations for images and users' feedback logs are used to refine annotations. A prototype system has developed to evaluate our proposed schemes, and our experimental results indicated that our approach outperforms traditional CBIR system and relevance feedback approaches.     

基于脉冲耦合神经网络的图像NMI特征提取及检索方法

为了简单有效地提取图像重要特征信息, 从而更好地提高检索图像的精度, 提出了一种基于脉冲耦合神经网络(Pulse coupled neural networks, PCNN)的图像归一化转动惯量(Normalized moment of inertia, NMI)特征提取及检索算法. 首先利用改进简化PCNN模型相似神经元同步时空特性及指数衰降机制将图像分解为具有相关性的二值系列图像, 然后提取反映原始图像目标形状、结构分布二值系列图像的一维NMI特征矢量信号, 并将其应用在图像检索中; 同时, 考虑到二值系列图像间的相关性及不同图像间NMI序列值的差异性, 引入了马氏距离结合Pearson积矩相关法的 综合相似性度量方法. 实验结果表明, 所提算法对图像特征矢量序列具有良好抗几何畸变不变特性及对图像表述的唯一性,且具有较好的图像检索效果.     

Extraction of major object features using VQ clustering for content-based image retrieval

An image representation method using vector quantization (VQ) on color and texture is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is also used to retrieve similar images from database systems. The basic idea is a transformation from the raw pixel data to a small set of image regions, which are coherent in color and texture space. A scheme is provided for object-based image retrieval. Features for image retrieval are the three color features (hue, saturation, and value) from the HSV color model and five textural features (ASM, contrast, correlation, variance, and entropy) from the gray-level co-occurrence matrices. Once the features are extracted from an image, eight-dimensional feature vectors represent each pixel in the image. The VQ algorithm is used to rapidly cluster those feature vectors into groups. A representative feature table based on the dominant groups is obtained and used to retrieve similar images according to the object within the image. This method can retrieve similar images even in cases where objects are translated, scaled, and rotated.     

综合颜色和纹理特征的图像检索算法

基于内容的图像检索是当前多媒体信息检索的热点之一。基于内容的图像检索技术是根据对图像内容(特征)的描述和提取,在图像库中找到具有指定内容(特征)的图像。本文对图像颜色特征和纹理特征的提取、相似性度量等基于内容的图像检索的关键技术进行了分析和研究,并在此基础上,提出了一个基于颜色特征和纹理特征的图像检索算法并验证了其有效性。该算法采用HSV颜色空间的直方图作为颜色特征向量,采用灰度共生矩阵的四个纹理特征:能量、熵、惯性矩和相关性构成纹理特征向量,采用欧氏距离进行相似性度量。实验结果表明,该算法实现的系统具有良好的图像检索功能。     

Unsupervised image retrieval framework based on rule base system

This paper introduces unsupervised image retrieval framework based on a rule base system. The proposed framework makes use of geometric moments (GMs) for features extraction. The main advantage with the GMs is that image coordinate transformations can be easily expressed and analyzed in terms of the corresponding transformations in the moment space. These features are used to perform the image mining for acquiring clustering knowledge from a large empirical images database. Irrelevance between images of the same cluster is precisely considered in the proposed framework through a relevant feedback phase followed by a novel clustering refinement model. The images and their corresponding classes pass to a rule base algorithm for extracting a set of accurate rules. These rules are pruning and may reduce the dimensionality of the extracted features. The advantage of the proposed framework is reflected in the retrieval process, which is limited to the images in the class of rule matched with the query image features. Experiments show that the proposed model achieves a very good performance in terms of the average precision, recall and retrieval time compared with other models.     

改进颜色和小波变换纹理的图像检索方法研究

针对传统图像检索无法体现对检索示例图像中多个不同对象的检索要求程度的问题,提出一种改进颜色特征和小波变换纹理特征的图像检索方法。首先提取出图像的多个感兴趣区域,由感兴趣的不同程度分别赋予不同大小的权值;然后提取颜色特征和纹理特征,分别用对应位置相似度计算、感兴趣区域与检索数据库中图像整体的相似度计算和整体检索示例图像与检索图像数据库中图像相似度计算三种不同方法计算出两幅图像的相似度,取最大的相似度作为两幅图像的最终相似度;对检索示例图像与检索数据库中每个图像的相似度按大小进行排序,选择最相似的图像作为检索结果。实验结果表明,该方法提高了对图像检索的性能,体现了个性化检索,对图像检索具有很好的效果。     

A new matching strategy for content based image retrieval system

Adopting effective model to access the desired images is essential nowadays with the presence of a huge amount of digital images. The present paper introduces an accurate and rapid model for content based image retrieval process depending on a new matching strategy. The proposed model is composed of four major phases namely: features extraction, dimensionality reduction, ANN classifier and matching strategy. As for the feature extraction phase, it extracts a color and texture features, respectively, called color co-occurrence matrix (CCM) and difference between pixels of scan pattern (DBPSP). However, integrating multiple features can overcome the problems of single feature, but the system works slowly mainly because of the high dimensionality of the feature space. Therefore, the dimensionality reduction technique selects the effective features that jointly have the largest dependency on the target class and minimal redundancy among themselves. Consequently, these features reduce the calculation work and the computation time in the retrieval process. The artificial neural network (ANN) in our proposed model serves as a classifier so that the selected features of query image are the input and its output is one of the multi classes that have the largest similarity to the query image. In addition, the proposed model presents an effective feature matching strategy that depends on the idea of the minimum area between two vectors to compute the similarity value between a query image and the images in the determined class. Finally, the results presented in this paper demonstrate that the proposed model provides accurate retrieval results and achieve improvement in performance with significantly less computation time compared with other models.     

基于空间上下文加权词汇树的图像检索方法

基于词汇树的词袋模型(Bag-of-Words)表示算法是目前图像检索领域中的主流算法.针对传统词汇树方法中空间上下文信息缺失的问题,提出一种基于空间上下文加权词汇树的图像检索方法.该方法在词汇树框架下,首先生成SIFT点的空间上下文信息描述.然后利用SIFT点间的空间上下文相似度对SIFT间的匹配得分进行加权,得到图像间的相似度.最后,通过相似度排序完成图像检索.实验结果表明,该方法能够大幅度提高图像检索的性能,同时,对大规模图像库有较好的适用性.     

Indexing shapes in image databases using the centroid–radii model

In content-based image retrieval systems, the content of an image such as color, shapes and textures are used to retrieve images that are similar to a query image. Most of the existing work focus on the retrieval effectiveness of using content for retrieval, i.e., study the accuracy (in terms of recall and precision) of using different representations of content. In this paper, we address the issue of retrieval efficiency, i.e., study the speed of retrieval, since a slow system is not useful for large image databases. In particular, we look at using the shape feature as the content of an image, and employ the centroid–radii model to represent the shape feature of objects in an image. This facilitates multi-resolution and similarity retrievals. Furthermore, using the model, the shape of an object can be transformed into a point in a high-dimensional data space. We can thus employ any existing high-dimensional point index as an index to speed up the retrieval of images. We propose a multi-level R-tree index, called the Nested R-trees (NR-trees) and compare its performance with that of the R-tree. Our experimental study shows that NR-trees can reduce the retrieval time significantly compared to R-tree, and facilitate similarity retrieval. We note that our NR-trees can also be used to index high-dimensional point data commonly found in many other applications.     

基于新的空间关系特征的图像检索方法

图像与图像之间没有清晰的空间结构,这样就不能有效利用图像间空间结构上的相关性信息,针对此问题提出一种基于新的空间关系特征的图像检索方法。首先,提取待查询图像在内的全部图像的特征向量。然后,计算特征向量每两个之间的相似性,形成相似性矩阵。将相似性矩阵的列集合作为新特征向量,命名为新的空间关系特征向量,从而将原来的特征向量映射到一个欧氏空间上。最后,在新特征空间上计算相似性,特征向量之间的相似性问题就转化为新的空间关系特征向量之间的相似性问题。在新特征空间上,图像与图像之间的空间结构变得清晰了,有利于图像检索准确度的提高。在Corel数据库上进行实验,所提方法在平均检索查准率、查全率-查准率和可视化评价指标上都优于基于颜色直方图的图像检索方法。结果表明,基于新的空间关系特征的图像检索方法有效利用了图像间空间结构上的相关性信息,具有更好的检索效果。     

图像检索中一种支持多例查询的新方法

基于内容的图像检索的关键问题之一是高层语义和低层图像特征之间的差异,相关反馈技术是缩短这个"语义鸿沟"的有效方法。本文提出了一种新的相关反馈算法,通过分析正例图像在特征空间中的散布来构造该类图像的投影空间,该空间对应于一个语义类在特征空间中分布密集的子空间,在投影空间中计算相似图像。同时根据每次反馈的信息不断修正投影空间来提高系统的检索性能。在Corel大图像库中的实验结果表明,该算法对多例图像查询有较好的检索效果。     

Using manual and automated annotations to search images by semantic similarity

Finding semantically similar images is a problem that relies on image annotations manually assigned by amateurs or professionals, or automatically computed by some algorithm using low-level image features. These image annotations create a keyword space where a dissimilarity function quantifies the semantic relationship among images. In this setting, the objective of this paper is two-fold. First, we compare amateur to professional user annotations and propose a model of manual annotation errors, more specifically, an asymmetric binary model. Second, we examine different aspects of search by semantic similarity. More specifically, we study the accuracy of manual annotations versus automatic annotations, the influence of manual annotations with different accuracies as a result of incorrect annotations, and revisit the influence of the keyword space dimensionality. To assess these aspects we conducted experiments on a professional image dataset (Corel) and two amateur image datasets (one with 25,000 Flickr images and a second with 269,648 Flickr images) with a large number of keywords, with different similarity functions and with both manual and automatic annotation methods. We find that Amateur-level manual annotations offers better performance for top ranked results in all datasets (MP@20). However, for full rank measures (MAP) in the real datasets (Flickr) retrieval by semantic similarity with automatic annotations is similar or better than amateur-level manual annotations.     

On stability of signature-based similarity measures for content-based image retrieval

Retrieving similar images from large image databases is a challenging task for today’s content-based retrieval systems. Aiming at high retrieval performance, these systems frequently capture the user’s notion of similarity through expressive image models and adaptive similarity measures. On the query side, image models can significantly differ in quality compared to those stored on the database side. Thus, similarity measures have to be robust against these individual quality changes in order to maintain high retrieval performance. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of the family of signature-based similarity measures in the context of content-based image retrieval. To this end, we introduce the generic concept of average precision stability, which measures the stability of a similarity measure with respect to changes in quality between the query and database side. In addition to the mathematical definition of average precision stability, we include a performance evaluation of the major signature-based similarity measures focusing on their stability with respect to querying image databases by examples of varying quality. Our performance evaluation on recent benchmark image databases reveals that the highest retrieval performance does not necessarily coincide with the highest stability.     

图像检索中的动态相似性度量方法

为提高图像检索的效率,近年来相关反馈机制被引入到了基于内容的图像检索领域。该文提出了一种新的相关反馈方法－－动态相似性度量方法。该方法建立在目前被广泛采用的图像相拟性度量方法的基础上,结合了相关反馈图像检索系统的时序特性,通过捕获用户的交互信息,动态地修正图像的相似性度量公式,从而把用户模型嵌入到了图像检索系统,在某种程度上使图像检索结果与人的主观感知更加接近。实验结果表明该方法的性能明显优于其它图像检索系统所采用的方法。