Adaptive image segmentation for region-based object retrieval using generalized Hough transform

Finding an object inside a target image by querying multimedia data is desirable, but remains a challenge. The effectiveness of region-based representation for content-based image retrieval is extensively studied in the literature. One common weakness of region-based approaches is that perform detection using low level visual features within the region and the homogeneous image regions have little correspondence to the semantic objects. Thus, the retrieval results are often far from satisfactory. In addition, the performance is significantly affected by consistency in the segmented regions of the target object from the query and database images. Instead of solving these problems independently, this paper proposes region-based object retrieval using the generalized Hough transform (GHT) and adaptive image segmentation. The proposed approach has two phases. First, a learning phase identifies and stores stable parameters for segmenting each database image. In the retrieval phase, the adaptive image segmentation process is also performed to segment a query image into regions for retrieving visual objects inside database images through the GHT with a modified voting scheme to locate the target visual object under a certain affine transformation. The learned parameters make the segmentation results of query and database images more stable and consistent. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method gives good performance in terms of retrieval accuracy, robustness, and execution speed.     

基于模糊熵的空间语义图像检索模型研究*

根据模糊熵理论和改进的空间信息分布,提出了颜色空间特征语义图像检索模型。阐述基于语法规则的颜色空间特征语义描述方法,构造从低层颜色空间特征到高层语义之间的映射,根据这些模糊语义值进行图像检索。实验结果表明,该模型能够有效地对图像高层语义进行刻画,由此实现的模型不仅能获得高效和稳定的检索结果,获得与人类视觉感知较好的一致性,该算法还能很好地消除低层图像空间特征和高层语义之间的语义鸿沟。     

一种基于本体的图像检索方法

提出一种基于本体的图像检索方法。该方法结合特定领域专家知识和对象例图,采用视觉对象本体来描述图像内特定对象的视觉特征,从而构建该领域包含视觉描述的知识库。在检索过程中,利用知识库内的对象的视觉本体描述和目标图像库内的图像低层特征相匹配执行图像检索任务,从而实现在高层次语义上的图像检索。实验结果表明了该方法的有效性和可行性,并在一定程度上缩小了视觉低层特征同图像高层语义的鸿沟。     

Semantic association enhancement transformer with relative position for image captioning

Transformer-based architectures have shown encouraging results in image captioning. They usually utilize self-attention based methods to establish the semantic association between objects in an image for predicting caption. However, when appearance features between the candidate object and query object show weak dependence, the self-attention based methods are hard to capture the semantic association between them. In this paper, a Semantic Association Enhancement Transformer model is proposed to address the above challenge. First, an Appearance-Geometry Multi-Head Attention is introduced to model a visual relationship by integrating the geometry features and appearance features of the objects. The visual relationship characterizes the semantic association and relative position among the objects. Secondly, a Visual Relationship Improving module is presented to weigh the importance of appearance feature and geometry feature of query object to the modeled visual relationship. Then, the visual relationship among different objects is adaptively improved according to the constructed importance, especially the objects with weak dependence on appearance features, thereby enhancing their semantic association. Extensive experiments on MS COCO dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

     

面向特定目标自识别的交通图像语义检索方法

为了从海量的道路交通图像中检索出违反交通法规的图像,提出了一种特定目标自识别的语义图像检索方法。首先,通过交通领域专家建立交通领域本体及道路交通规则描述;然后,通过卷积神经网络（CNN）对交通图像的特征进行提取,并结合改进的支持向量机决策树（SVM-DT）算法对图像特征进行分类的策略,对交通图像中的特定目标及目标间空间位置关系进行自动识别,并映射成为相应的本体实例及其对象之间的关联关系（规则实例）;最后,利用本体实例和规则实例,通过推理得到语义检索结果。实验结果表明,相比关键字和本体交通图像语义检索方法,所提方法具有更高的准确率、召回率和检索效率。     

A survey of content-based image retrieval with high-level semantics

In order to improve the retrieval accuracy of content-based image retrieval systems, research focus has been shifted from designing sophisticated low-level feature extraction algorithms to reducing the ‘semantic gap’ between the visual features and the richness of human semantics. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive survey of the recent technical achievements in high-level semantic-based image retrieval. Major recent publications are included in this survey covering different aspects of the research in this area, including low-level image feature extraction, similarity measurement, and deriving high-level semantic features. We identify five major categories of the state-of-the-art techniques in narrowing down the ‘semantic gap’: (1) using object ontology to define high-level concepts; (2) using machine learning methods to associate low-level features with query concepts; (3) using relevance feedback to learn users’ intention; (4) generating semantic template to support high-level image retrieval; (5) fusing the evidences from HTML text and the visual content of images for WWW image retrieval. In addition, some other related issues such as image test bed and retrieval performance evaluation are also discussed. Finally, based on existing technology and the demand from real-world applications, a few promising future research directions are suggested.     

Complementary relevance feedback-based content-based image retrieval

We propose a complementary relevance feedback-based content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system. This system exploits the synergism between short-term and long-term learning techniques to improve the retrieval performance. Specifically, we construct an adaptive semantic repository in long-term learning to store retrieval patterns of historical query sessions. We then extract high-level semantic features from the semantic repository and seamlessly integrate low-level visual features and high-level semantic features in short-term learning to effectively represent the query in a single retrieval session. The high-level semantic features are dynamically updated based on users’ query concept and therefore represent the image’s semantic concept more accurately. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms its seven state-of-the-art peer systems in terms of retrieval precision and storage space on a large scale imagery database.     

基于GIS语义的遥感图像检索

语义图像检索为填补图像低层视觉特征和用户高层语义之间的鸿沟而产生,图像语义描述和提取是其关键。提出了一种基于G IS语义的遥感图像检索(G IS sem antics-based remote sensing im age retrieval,简称G ISSB IR)方法,主要涉及空间对象的语义表达和语义匹配两方面内容。利用面向对象G IS语义模型和概念语义网络共同表达空间对象的语义,设计了语义调解器处理用户与系统之间的语义不一致。通过对G IS原子查询结果进行布尔运算得到矢量查询结果,在此基础上得到与G IS数据具有统一坐标框架的遥感图像检索结果。实验结果表明G ISSB IR方法是有效的。     

Region-based image retrieval with high-level semantics using decision tree learning

Semantic-based image retrieval has attracted great interest in recent years. This paper proposes a region-based image retrieval system with high-level semantic learning. The key features of the system are: (1) it supports both query by keyword and query by region of interest. The system segments an image into different regions and extracts low-level features of each region. From these features, high-level concepts are obtained using a proposed decision tree-based learning algorithm named DT-ST. During retrieval, a set of images whose semantic concept matches the query is returned. Experiments on a standard real-world image database confirm that the proposed system significantly improves the retrieval performance, compared with a conventional content-based image retrieval system. (2) The proposed decision tree induction method DT-ST for image semantic learning is different from other decision tree induction algorithms in that it makes use of the semantic templates to discretize continuous-valued region features and avoids the difficult image feature discretization problem. Furthermore, it introduces a hybrid tree simplification method to handle the noise and tree fragmentation problems, thereby improving the classification performance of the tree. Experimental results indicate that DT-ST outperforms two well-established decision tree induction algorithms ID3 and C4.5 in image semantic learning.     

基于内容的图象检索中的语义处理方法

基于内容的图象检索系统,其目标是最大限度地减小图象简单视觉特征与用户检索丰富语义之间的“语义鸿沟”,因此图象语义处理则成为基于内容的图象检索进一步发展的关键。为了使人们对基于内容的图象检索中的语义处理方法有个概略了解,首先从图象语义模型和图象语义提取方法这两个方面对利用语义进行图象检索的研究状况进行了总结,并将图象语义模型概括为图象语义知识、图象语义层次模型和语义抽取模型等3个主要组成部分;然后将图象语义提取方法分为用户交互、将查询请求作为语义模板、对象及其空间关系、场景和行为语义及情感语义等类别,同时对其中有代表性的方法进行了详细的分析,还指出了其局限性;最后从对象建模和识别、语义抽取规则和用户检索模型3个方面,阐明了实现图象语义处理所面临的问题,并提出了一些初步的解决思路。     

基于本体的图像检索

提出一种基于本体的图像检索方法,该方法首先采用改进的K均值无监督分割方法将图像分割成区域,然后提取每个区域的颜色、形状、位置、纹理等低层描述特征,应用这些特征定义一个简单的对象本体。为了提高图像检索的准确度,最后采用支持向量机（SVM）的相关反馈算法。实验结果表明,提出的方法不仅可以提高检索效率,而且对于缩小低层视觉特征和高层语义特征之间的“语义鸿沟”具有很大的意义。     

一种基于多层语义特征的图像理解方法

视觉场景理解包括检测和识别物体、推理被检测物体之间的视觉关系以及使用语句描述图像区域.为了实现对场景图像更全面、更准确的理解,将物体检测、视觉关系检测和图像描述视为场景理解中3种不同语义层次的视觉任务,提出一种基于多层语义特征的图像理解模型,并将这3种不同语义层进行相互连接以共同解决场景理解任务.该模型通过一个信息传递图将物体、关系短语和图像描述的语义特征同时进行迭代和更新,更新后的语义特征被用于分类物体和视觉关系、生成场景图和描述,并引入融合注意力机制以提升描述的准确性.在视觉基因组和COCO数据集上的实验结果表明,所提出的方法在场景图生成和图像描述任务上拥有比现有方法更好的性能.     

Learning a hierarchical image manifold for Web image classification

Image classification is an essential task in content-based image retrieval.However,due to the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts,and the diversification of Web images,the performance of traditional classification approaches is far from users’ expectations.In an attempt to reduce the semantic gap and satisfy the urgent requirements for dimensionality reduction,high-quality retrieval results,and batch-based processing,we propose a hierarchical image manifold with novel distance measures for calculation.Assuming that the images in an image set describe the same or similar object but have various scenes,we formulate two kinds of manifolds,object manifold and scene manifold,at different levels of semantic granularity.Object manifold is developed for object-level classification using an algorithm named extended locally linear embedding(ELLE) based on intra-and inter-object difference measures.Scene manifold is built for scene-level classification using an algorithm named locally linear submanifold extraction(LLSE) by combining linear perturbation and region growing.Experimental results show that our method is effective in improving the performance of classifying Web images.     

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.     

基于耦合相关度的空间数据查询结果自动分类方法

由于空间数据库通常蕴含海量数据,因此一个普通的空间查询很可能会导致多查询结果问题。为了解决上述问题,提出了一种空间查询结果自动分类方法。在离线阶段,根据空间对象之间的位置相近度和语义相关度来评估空间对象之间的耦合关系,在此基础上利用概率密度评估方法对空间对象进行聚类,每个聚类代表一种类型的用户需求;在在线查询处理阶段,对于一个给定的空间查询,在查询结果集上利用改进的C4.5决策树算法动态生成一棵查询结果分类树,用户可通过检查分类树分支的标签来逐步定位到其感兴趣的空间对象。实验结果表明,提出的空间对象聚类方法能够有效地体现空间对象在语义和位置上的相近性,查询结果分类方法具有较好的分类效果和较低的搜索代价。     

Combining pixel domain and compressed domain index for sketch based image retrieval

Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) lets one express a precise visual query with simple and widespread means. In the SBIR approaches, the challenge consists in representing the image dataset features in a structure that allows one to efficiently and effectively retrieve images in a scalable system. We put forward a sketch-based image retrieval solution where sketches and natural image contours are represented and compared, in both, the compressed-domain of wavelet and in the pixel domain. The query is efficiently performed in the wavelet domain, while effectiveness refinements are achieved using the pixel domain to verify the spatial consistency between the sketch strokes and the natural image contours. Also, we present an efficient scheme of inverted lists for sketch-based image retrieval using the compressed-domain of wavelets. Our proposal of indexing presents two main advantages, the amount of the data to compute the query is smaller than the traditional method while it presents a better effectiveness.     

Mobile multi-view object image search

High user interaction capability of mobile devices can help improve the accuracy of mobile visual search systems. At query time, it is possible to capture multiple views of an object from different viewing angles and at different scales with the mobile device camera to obtain richer information about the object compared to a single view and hence return more accurate results. Motivated by this, we propose a new multi-view visual query model on multi-view object image databases for mobile visual search. Multi-view images of objects acquired by the mobile clients are processed and local features are sent to a server, which combines the query image representations with early/late fusion methods and returns the query results. We performed a comprehensive analysis of early and late fusion approaches using various similarity functions, on an existing single view and a new multi-view object image database. The experimental results show that multi-view search provides significantly better retrieval accuracy compared to traditional single view search.