A new relevance feedback technique for iconic image retrieval based on spatial relationships

Due to the popularity of Internet and the growing demand of image access, the volume of image databases is exploding. Hence, we need a more efficient and effective image searching technology. Relevance feedback technique has been popularly used with content-based image retrieval (CBIR) to improve the precision performance, however, it has never been used with the retrieval systems based on spatial relationships. Hence, we propose a new relevance feedback framework to deal with spatial relationships represented by a specific data structure, called the 2D B_e-string. The notions of relevance estimation and query reformulation are embodied in our method to exploit the relevance knowledge. The irrelevance information is collected in an irrelevant set to rule out undesired pictures and to expedite the convergence speed of relevance feedback. Our system not only handles picture-based relevance feedback, but also deals with region-based feedback mechanism, such that the efficacy and effectiveness of our retrieval system are both satisfactory.     

Spatial inference and similarity retrieval of an intelligent image database system based on object's spanning representation

In this paper, we presented a novel image representation method to capture the information about spatial relationships between objects in a picture. Our method is more powerful than all other previous methods in terms of accuracy, flexibility, and capability of discriminating pictures. In addition, our method also provides different degrees of granularity for reasoning about directional relations in both 8- and 16-direction reference frames. In similarity retrieval, our system provides twelve types of similarity measures to support flexible matching between the query picture and the database pictures. By exercising a database containing 3600 pictures, we successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of our image retrieval system. Experiment result showed that 97.8% precision rate can be achieved while maintaining 62.5% recall rate; and 97.9% recall rate can be achieved while maintaining 51.7% precision rate. On an average, 86.1% precision rate and 81.2% recall rate can be achieved simultaneously if the threshold is set to 0.5 or 0.6. This performance is considered to be very good as an information retrieval system.     

Spatial reasoning and similarity retrieval for image database systems based on RS-strings

In this paper, we propose a rotation-invariant spatial knowledge representation called RS-string. Then we present the string generation algorithm to automatically generate RS-strings for segmented pictures. We also propose the spatial reasoning and similarity retrieval algorithms based on RS-strings. The similarity retrieval algorithm is much more flexible than all previous 2D string representations because our approach can consider every possible view of a query picture. Thus the system does not require the user to provide a query picture which must have the same orientation as that of a database picture. Finally, we provide several examples to demonstrate the capabilities of spatial reasoning and similarity retrieval based on the RS-string representation.     

Graph-based representation for similarity retrieval of symbolic images

Image retrieval from an image database by the image objects and their spatial relationships has emerged as an important research subject in these decades. To retrieve images similar to a given query image, retrieval methods must assess the similarity degree between a database image and the query image by the extracted features with acceptable efficiency and effectiveness. This paper proposes a graph-based model SRG (spatial relation graph) to represent the semantic information of the contained objects and their spatial relationships in an image with no file annotation. In an SRG graph, the image objects are symbolized by the predefined class names as vertices and the spatial relations between object pairs are represented as arcs. The proposed model assesses the similarity degree between two images by calculating the maximum common subgraph of two corresponding SRG’s through intersection, which has quadratic time complexity owing to the characteristics of SRG. Its efficiency remains quadratic regardless of the duplication rate of the object symbols. The extended model SRG_T is also proposed, with the same time complexity, for the applications that need to consider the topological relations among objects. A synthetic symbolic image database and an existing image dataset are used in the conducted experiments to verify the performance of the proposed models. The experimental results show that the proposed models have compatible retrieval quality with remarkable efficiency improvements compared with three well-known methods LCS_Clique, SIM_R, and 2D Be-string, where LCS_Clique utilizes the number of objects in the maximum common subimage as its similarity function, SIM_R uses accumulation-based similarity function of similar object pairs, and 2D Be-string calculates the similarity of 2D patterns by the linear combination of two 1D similarities.     

Applying VSM and LCS to develop an integrated text retrieval mechanism

Text retrieval has received a lot of attention in computer science. In the text retrieval field, the most widely-adopted similarity technique is using vector space models (VSM) to evaluate the weight of terms and using Cosine, Jaccard or Dice to measure the similarity between the query and the texts. However, these similarity techniques do not consider the effect of the sequence of the information. In this paper, we propose an integrated text retrieval (ITR) mechanism that takes the advantage of both VSM and longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm. The key idea of the ITR mechanism is to use LCS to re-evaluate the weight of terms, so that the sequence and weight relationships between the query and the texts can be considered simultaneously. The results of mathematical analysis show that the ITR mechanism can increase the similarity on Jaccard and Dice similarity measurements when a sequential relationship exists between the query and the texts.     

Reasoning about pictures and similarity retrieval for image information systems based on SK-set knowledge representation

Spatial reasoning and similarity retrieval are two important functions of any image information system. Good spatial knowledge representation for images is necessary to adequately support these two functions. In this paper, we propose a new spatial knowledge representation, called the SK-set based on morphological skeleton theories. Spatial reasoning algorithms which achieve more accurate results by directly analysing skeletons are described. SK-set facilitates browsing and progressive visualization. We also define four new types of similarity measures and propose a similarity retrieval algorithm for performing image retrieval. Moreover, using SK-set as a spatial knowledge representation will reduce the storage space required by an image database significantly.     

An efficient iconic indexing strategy for image rotation and reflection in image databases

Spatial relationships are important issues for similarity-based retrieval in many image database applications. With the popularity of digital cameras and the related image processing software, a sequence of images are often rotated or flipped. That is, those images are transformed in the rotation orientation or the reflection direction. However, many iconic indexing strategies based on symbolic projection are sensitive to rotation or reflection. Therefore, these strategies may miss the qualified images, when the query is issued in the orientation different from the orientation of the database images. To solve this problem, some researchers proposed a function to map the spatial relationship to its transformed one. However, this mapping consists of several conditional statements, which is time-consuming. Thus, in this paper, we propose an efficient iconic indexing strategy, in which we carefully assign a unique bit pattern to each spatial relationship and record the spatial information based on the bit patterns in a matrix. Without generating the rotated or flipped image, we can directly derive the index of the rotated or flipped image from the index of the original one by bit operations and matrix manipulation. In our performance study, we analyze the time complexity of our proposed strategy and show the efficiency of our proposed strategy according to the simulation results. Moreover, we implement a prototype to validate our proposed strategy.     

Visual word spatial arrangement for image retrieval and classification

We present word spatial arrangement (WSA), an approach to represent the spatial arrangement of visual words under the bag-of-visual-words model. It lies in a simple idea which encodes the relative position of visual words by splitting the image space into quadrants using each detected point as origin. WSA generates compact feature vectors and is flexible for being used for image retrieval and classification, for working with hard or soft assignment, requiring no pre/post processing for spatial verification. Experiments in the retrieval scenario show the superiority of WSA in relation to Spatial Pyramids. Experiments in the classification scenario show a reasonable compromise between those methods, with Spatial Pyramids generating larger feature vectors, while WSA provides adequate performance with much more compact features. As WSA encodes only the spatial information of visual words and not their frequency of occurrence, the results indicate the importance of such information for visual categorization.     

一种基于形状的图像信息检索方法

该文把一幅图像看成是由一些区域构成的,这些区域在其内部有着颜色或纹理等方面的相似性,图像的形状由这些区域的边界线及其空间关系来描述.要根据图像中所包含的物体或场景在形状方面的特征进行检索,关键问题是形状相似性的度量及其空间关系的表示与匹配.文章应用变形模板匹配技术,提出了较为合理的简单形状相似性计算方法,而这些简单形状之间的空间关系则由二维集合串来表示.文章还给出了空间关系匹配算法,在检索方法上,将整个检索过程分为初级检索、检索求精与空间关系匹配3个阶段.实验表明,此方法既有较高的检索速度,又有较高的检索精度.     

Visual guided navigation for image retrieval

In this work, we are interested in technologies that will allow users to actively browse and navigate large image databases and to retrieve images through interactive fast browsing and navigation. The development of a browsing/navigation-based image retrieval system has at least two challenges. The first is that the system's graphical user interface (GUI) should intuitively reflect the distribution of the images in the database in order to provide the users with a mental picture of the database content and a sense of orientation during the course of browsing/navigation. The second is that it has to be fast and responsive, and be able to respond to users actions at an interactive speed in order to engage the users. We have developed a method that attempts to address these challenges of a browsing/navigation based image retrieval systems. The unique feature of the method is that we take an integrated approach to the design of the browsing/navigation GUI and the indexing and organization of the images in the database. The GUI is tightly coupled with the algorithms that run in the background. The visual cues of the GUI are logically linked with various parts of the repository (image clusters of various particular visual themes) thus providing intuitive correspondences between the GUI and the database contents. In the backend, the images are organized into a binary tree data structure using a sequential maximal information coding algorithm and each image is indexed by an n-bit binary index thus making response to users’ action very fast. We present experimental results to demonstrate the usefulness of our method both as a pre-filtering tool and for developing browsing/navigation systems for fast image retrieval from large image databases.     

Mining spatial association rules in image databases

In this paper, we propose a novel spatial mining algorithm, called 9DLT-Miner, to mine the spatial association rules from an image database, where every image is represented by the 9DLT representation. The proposed method consists of two phases. First, we find all frequent patterns of length one. Next, we use frequent k-patterns (k ? 1) to generate all candidate (k + 1)-patterns. For each candidate pattern generated, we scan the database to count the pattern’s support and check if it is frequent. The steps in the second phase are repeated until no more frequent patterns can be found. Since our proposed algorithm prunes most of impossible candidates, it is more efficient than the Apriori algorithm. The experiment results show that 9DLT-Miner runs 2-5 times faster than the Apriori algorithm.     

HD/SHD still image database system and image distribution in broadband network applications

This paper focuses on a practical design for an efficient scalable image database and retrieval system over broadband networks. It describes a concrete solution for the implementation of HD/SHD (high-definition/super-high-definition) still image retrieval services which can be used in different applications. The structure of the complete system, consisting of a directory server, an image server, and MMI (man-machine interface) devices, has been presented, detailing each element and their corresponding functions. The desired HD/SHD image is displayed on the HD-PDP (plasma display panel) with the aid of image matching. The proposed system generates image index automatically, eliminating special skills in preparing index images and crucially reducing the processing time (from 35 min to 110 s), and does not use keywords. It has been also shown that these indices can be used for quite accurate image retrieval, i.e., the system provides high precision rates (currently up to 98%) to the user, eliminating troubles encountered in the image retrieval operations due to limitation on the user’s age, culture, knowledge, and languages.The broadband IP networks currently have a number of issues from the viewpoint of practical system operations, and so the requirements and issues needed for the networks are discussed from the viewpoint of in-service performance, differentiation among different types of services, secure connections, and so on, focusing on handling of HD/SHD still images.     

Similarity-based image retrieval system using partitioned iterated function system codes

We propose a new image retrieval system using partitioned iterated function system (PIFS) codes. In PIFS encoding, a compression code contains mapping information between similar regions in the same image. This mapping information can be treated as vectors, and representative vectors can be generated using them. Representative vectors describe the features of the image. Hence, the similarity between images is directly calculable from representative vectors. This similarity is applicable to image retrieval. In this article, we explain this scheme and demonstrate its efficiency experimentally. This work was presented, in part, at the 8th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 24#x2013;26, 2003     

雷达目标全姿态RCS数据库设计与检索方法

由于雷达目标全姿态RCS数据动辄拥有108条记录,对如此庞大的数据集进行的存储与检索操作常常是系统性能的瓶颈,其效率决定着算法的可行性。针对该问题,对传统的目标全姿态RCS数据库设计方案加以改进,提出了一种更加高效的存储机制;在此基础上,提出了基于数组的雷达目标全姿态RCS数据库检索方法。它利用了Oracle DBMS的强大管理功能和内存缓冲的高效检索,通过结构化数组下标计算对应到内存缓冲区中的预期偏移量,省略了反复的数据查表工作。实验效率分析表明,新方法对于数据存储和检索效率均有显著提升。     

一种图像数据库聚类与归类方法研究

为克服目前图像库浏览系统存在的效率低和交互性差等缺点,提出一种新的图像库聚类与归类方法.采用随机抽取图像特征矩阵的列和网格划分矩阵的行,求图库特征的近似最优稀疏矩阵.对此矩阵进行奇异值分解,以实现高维图像特征库降维;然后采用密度估计技术和爬山策略,定义和提取图像数据库的聚类以及归类.实验表明,该方法比其他方法交互性好、速度快,具有对噪声数据不敏感等优点.     

Integrated probability function and its application to content-based image retrieval by relevance feedback

In the last few years, we have seen an upsurge of interest in content-based image retrieval (CBIR)—the selection of images from a collection via features extracted from images themselves. Often, a single image attribute may not have enough discriminative information for successful retrieval. On the other hand when multiple features are used, it is hard to determine the suitable weighing factors for various features for optimal retrieval. In this paper, we present a relevance feedback framework with Integrated Probability Function (IPF) which combines multiple features for optimal retrieval. The IPF is based on a new posterior probability estimator and a novel weight updating approach. We perform experiments on 1400 monochromatic trademark images have been performed. The proposed IPF is shown to be more effective and efficient to retrieve deformed trademark images than the commonly used integrated dissimilarity function. The new posterior probability estimator is shown to be generally better than the existing one. The proposed novel weight updating approach by relevance feedback is shown to be better than both the existing scoring approach and the existing ratio approach. In experiments, 95% of the targets are ranked at the top five positions. By two iterations of relevance feedback, retrieval performance can be improved from 75% to over 95%. The IPF and its relevance feedback framework proposed in this paper can be effectively and efficiently used in content-based image retrieval.     

FOCUS: A system for searching for multi-colored objects in a diverse image database

We describe a new multi-phase, color-based image retrieval system (FOCUS) which is capable of identifying multi-colored query objects in an image in the presence of significant, interfering backgrounds. The query object may occur in arbitrary sizes, orientations, and locations in the database images. Scale and rotation invariant color features have been developed to describe an image, such that the matching process is fast even in the case of complex images. The first phase of processing matches the query object color with the color content of an image computed as the peaks in the color histogram of the image. The second phase matches the spatial relationships between color regions in the image with the query using a spatial proximity graph (SPG) structure designed for the purpose. Processing at coarse granularity is preferred over pixel-level processing to produce simpler graphs, which significantly reduces computation time during matching. The speed of the system and the small storage overhead make it suitable for use in large databases with online user interfaces. Test results with multi-colored query objects from man-made and natural domains show that FOCUS is quite effective in handling interfering backgrounds and large variations in scale. The experimental results on a database of diverse images highlights the capabilities of the system.