Content-based image retrieval using local visual attention feature

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been an active research topic in the last decade. As one of the promising approaches, salient point based image retrieval has attracted many researchers. However, the related work is usually very time consuming, and some salient points always may not represent the most interesting subset of points for image indexing. Based on fast and performant salient point detector, and the salient point expansion, a novel content-based image retrieval using local visual attention feature is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the salient image points are extracted by using the fast and performant SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Features) detector. Then, the visually significant image points around salient points can be obtained according to the salient point expansion. Finally, the local visual attention feature of visually significant image points, including the weighted color histogram and spatial distribution entropy, are extracted, and the similarity between color images is computed by using the local visual attention feature. Experimental results, including comparisons with the state-of-the-art retrieval systems, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.     

A heuristic framework for perceptual saliency prediction

Saliency prediction can be regarded as the human spontaneous activity. The most effective saliency model should highly approximate the response of viewers to the perceived information. In the paper, we exploit the perception response for saliency detection and propose a heuristic framework to predict salient region. First, to find the perceptually meaningful salient regions, an orientation selectivity based local feature and a visual Acuity based global feature are proposed to jointly predict candidate salient regions. Subsequently, to further boost the accuracy of saliency map, we introduce a visual error sensitivity based operator to activate the meaningful salient regions from a local and global perspective. In addition, an adaptive fusion method based on free energy principle is designed to combine the sub-saliency maps from each image channel to obtain the final saliency map. Experimental results on five natural and emotional datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to twelve state-of-the-art algorithms.     

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.     

基于潜在语义分析和相关反馈的图像检索方法

为了解决传统的CBIR系统中存在的"语义鸿沟"问题,提出一种基于潜在语义索引技术(LSI)和相关反馈技术的图像检索方法.在进行图像检索时,先在HSV空间下提取颜色直方图作为底层视觉特征进行图像检索,然后引入潜在语义索引技术试图将底层特征赋予更高层次的语义含义;并且结合相关反馈技术,通过与用户交互进一步提高检索精度.实验...     

A novel long-term learning algorithm for relevance feedback in content-based image retrieval

Relevance feedback has proven to be a powerful tool to bridge the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level human concepts in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). However, traditional short-term relevance feedback technologies are confined to using the current feedback record only. Log-based long-term learning captures the semantic relationships among images in a database by analyzing the historical relevance information to boost the retrieval performance effectively. In this paper, we propose an expanded-judging model to analyze the historical log data’s semantic information and to expand the feedback sample set from both positive and negative relevant information. The index table is used to facilitate the log analysis. The expanded-judging model is applied in image retrieval by combining with short-term relevance feedback algorithms. Experiments were carried out to evaluate the proposed algorithm based on the Corel image database. The promising experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed expanded-judging model.     

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.     

Hybrid textual-visual relevance learning for content-based image retrieval

Learning effective relevance measures plays a crucial role in improving the performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. Despite extensive research efforts for decades, how to discover and incorporate semantic information of images still poses a formidable challenge to real-world CBIR systems. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid textual-visual relevance learning method, which mines textual relevance from image tags and combines textual relevance and visual relevance for CBIR. To alleviate the sparsity and unreliability of tags, we first perform tag completion to fill the missing tags as well as correct noisy tags of images. Then, we capture users’ semantic cognition to images by representing each image as a probability distribution over the permutations of tags. Finally, instead of early fusion, a ranking aggregation strategy is adopted to sew up textual relevance and visual relevance seamlessly. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets well verified the promise of our approach.     

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.     

超复数域小波变换的显著性检测

针对现有频域显著性检测方法得到的显著区域不完整的问题,该文提出一种多尺度分析的频率域显著性检测方法。首先由输入图像特征通道信息构建4元超复数,然后通过小波变换对4元超复数域中幅度谱进行多尺度分解,计算生成多尺度下的视觉显著图,最后由评价函数选出效果较好显著图合成最终视觉显著图。实验结果表明,该文方法能够有效地抑制背景干扰,快速、精确地找到完整的显著目标,具有较高的检测精确度。     

Bayesian salient object detection based on saliency driven clustering

Salient object detection is essential for applications, such as image classification, object recognition and image retrieval. In this paper, we design a new approach to detect salient objects from an image by describing what does salient objects and backgrounds look like using statistic of the image. First, we introduce a saliency driven clustering method to reveal distinct visual patterns of images by generating image clusters. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is applied to represent the statistic of each cluster, which is used to compute the color spatial distribution. Second, three kinds of regional saliency measures, i.e, regional color contrast saliency, regional boundary prior saliency and regional color spatial distribution, are computed and combined. Then, a region selection strategy integrating color contrast prior, boundary prior and visual patterns information of images is presented. The pixels of an image are divided into either potential salient region or background region adaptively based on the combined regional saliency measures. Finally, a Bayesian framework is employed to compute the saliency value for each pixel taking the regional saliency values as priority. Our approach has been extensively evaluated on two popular image databases. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve considerable performance improvement in terms of commonly adopted performance measures in salient object detection.     

自注意力引导的红外与可见光图像融合算法

为确保源图像中的显著区域在融合图像保持显著,提出了一种自注意力引导的红外与可见光图像融合方法。在特征学习层引入自注意力学习机制获取源图像的特征图和自注意力图,利用自注意力图可以捕获到图像中长距离依赖的特性,设计平均加权融合策略对源图像的特征图进行融合,最后将融合后的特征图进行重构获得融合图像。通过生成对抗网络实现了图像特征编码、自注意力学习、融合规则和融合特征解码的学习。TNO真实数据上的实验表明,学习到注意力单元体现了图像中显著的区域,能够较好地引导融合规则的生成,提出的算法在客观和主观评价上优于当前主流红外与可见光图像融合算法,较好地保留了可见光图像的细节信息和红外图像的红外目标信息。     

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。     

视觉注意驱动的基于混沌分析的运动检测方法

提出了视觉注意驱动的基于混沌分析的运动检测方法(MDSA)。MDSA首先基于视觉注意机制提取图像的显著区域,而后对显著区域进行混沌分析以检测运动目标。算法技术路线为:首先根据场景图像提取多种视觉敏感的底层图像特征;然后根据特征综合理论将这些特征融合起来得到一幅反映场景图像中各个位置视觉显著性的显著图;而后对显著性水平最高的图像位置所在的显著区域运用混沌分析的方法进行运动检测;根据邻近优先和返回抑制原则提取下一最显著区域并进行运动检测,直至遍历所有的显著区域。本文对传统的显著区域提取方法进行了改进以减少计算量:以邻域标准差代替center-surround算子评估图像各位置的局部显著度,采用显著点聚类的方法代替尺度显著性准则提取显著区域;混沌分析首先判断各显著区域的联合直方图（JH）是否呈现混沌特征,而后依据分维数以一固定阈值对存在混沌的JH中各散点进行分类,最后将分类结果对应到显著区域从而实现运动分割。MDSA具有较好的运动分割效果和抗噪性能,对比实验和算法开销分析证明MDSA优于基于马塞克的运动检测方法（MDM）。      

基于显著点特征多示例学习的图像检索方法

提出了一种基于图像显著点特征进行多示例学习(Multiple-instance learning)的图像检索方法.该方法对图像进行小波分解并跟踪不同尺度小波系数提取图像显著点;然后利用显著点特征进行检索,并在相关反馈中将图像看作多示例包,通过期望最大多样性密度(EM-DD,expectation maximization diverse density)方法进行多示例学习,获得体现图像语义的日标特征.在Corel和SIVAL两个图像库进行实验,结果表明该方法明显提高了检索的准确性.     

融合颜色特征和对比度特征的图像显著性检测

图像显著性检测能够获取一幅图像的视觉显著性区域,是计算机视觉的研究热点之一。提出一种结合颜色特征和对比度特征的图像显著性检测方法。首先构造图像在HSV空间的颜色函数以获取图像颜色特征;然后使用SLIC超像素分割算法对图像进行预处理,基于超像素块的对比度特征计算图像显著性;最后将融合颜色特征和对比度特征的显著图经过导向滤波优化形成最终的显著图。使用本文算法在公开数据集MSRA-1000上进行图像显著性检测,并与其他6种算法进行比较。实验结果表明本文算法结合了图像像素点和像素块的信息,检测的图像显著性区域轮廓更加完整,优于其他方法。     

Saliency detection based on singular value decomposition

Saliency detection has gained popularity in many applications, and many different approaches have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on singular value decomposition (SVD) for saliency detection. Our algorithm considers both the human-perception mechanism and the relationship between the singular values of an image decomposed by SVD and its salient regions. The key concept of our proposed algorithms is based on the fact that salient regions are the important parts of an image. The singular values of an image are divided into three groups: large, intermediate, and small singular values. We propose the hypotheses that the large singular values mainly contain information about the non-salient background and slight information about the salient regions, while the intermediate singular values contain most or even all of the saliency information. The small singular values contain little or even none of the saliency information. These hypotheses are validated by experiments. By regularization based on the average information, regularization using the leading largest singular values or regularization based on machine learning, the salient regions will become more conspicuous. In our proposed approach, learning-based methods are proposed to improve the accuracy of detecting salient regions in images. Gaussian filters are also employed to enhance the saliency information. Experimental results prove that our methods based on SVD achieve superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods for human-eye fixations, as well as salient-object detection, in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) score, the linear correlation coefficient (CC) score, the normalized scan-path saliency (NSS) score, the F-measure score, and visual quality.     

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.     

基于多特征扩散方法的显著性物体检测

现有的大部分基于扩散理论的显著性物体检测方法只用了图像的底层特征来构造图和扩散矩阵,并且忽视了显著性物体在图像边缘的可能性。针对此,该文提出一种基于图像的多层特征的扩散方法进行显著性物体检测。首先,采用由背景先验、颜色先验、位置先验组成的高层先验方法选取种子节点。其次,将选取的种子节点的显著性信息通过由图像的底层特征构建的扩散矩阵传播到每个节点得到初始显著图,并将其作为图像的中层特征。然后结合图像的高层特征分别构建扩散矩阵,再次运用扩散方法分别获得中层显著图、高层显著图。最后,非线性融合中层显著图和高层显著图得到最终显著图。该算法在3个数据集MSRA10K,DUT-OMRON和ECSSD上,用3种量化评价指标与现有4种流行算法进行实验结果对比,均取得最好的效果。     

基于流形排名与迟滞阈值法的视觉显著性检测

视觉显著性检测是机器视觉领域的关键技术之一.提出一种基于流形排名与迟滞阈值的检测方法,首先将图像划分成超像素集合,以之作为结点形成闭环图;再按照基于图的流形排名方法计算各个结点的显著值,形成图像的显著图;然后利用显著图直方图统计出高、低两个阈值,将显著图划分为三个部分,使用伽马校正技术分别进行处理,最终整合校正结果得到输出显著图.实验结果表明,相对于现有算法,本文算法得到的显著图能够更好地区分背景区域和显著目标,同时也更具稳健性.