Context-sensitive queries for image retrieval in digital libraries

In this paper we show how to achieve a more effective Query By Example processing, by using active mechanisms of biological vision, such as saccadic eye movements and fixations. In particular, we discuss the way to generate two fixation sequences from a query image I _q and a test image I _t of the data set, respectively, and how to compare the two sequences in order to compute a similarity measure between the two images. Meanwhile, we show how the approach can be used to discover and represent the hidden semantic associations among images, in terms of categories, which in turn drive the query process.     

An effective method for color image retrieval based on texture

This paper presents an effective color image retrieval method based on texture, which uses the color co-occurrence matrix to extract the texture feature and measure the similarity of two color images. Due to the color information such as components and distribution is also taken into consideration, the feature obtained not only reflects the texture correlation but also represents the color information. As a result, our proposed method is superior to the gray-level co-occurrence matrix method and color histogram method, and it enhances the retrieval accuracy which is measured in terms of the recall and precision in the meanwhile.     

An authorization system for digital libraries

Digital Libraries (DLs) introduce several challenging requirements with respect to the formulation, specification, and enforcement of adequate data protection policies. Unlike conventional database environments, a DL environment typically is characterized by a dynamic subject population, often making accesses from remote locations, and by an extraordinarily large amount of multimedia information, stored in a variety of formats. Moreover, in a DL environment, access policies are often specified based on subject qualifications and characteristics, rather than subject identity. Traditional authorization models are not adequate to meet access control requirements of DLs. In this paper, we present a Digital Library Authorization System (DLAS). DLAS employs a content-based authorization model, called a Digital Library Authorization Model (DLAM) which was proposed in previous work [1]. Edited by Y. Yesha. Received: 21 December 2000 / Accepted: 6 March 2002 Published online: 14 May 2002     

Scale-orientation histogram for texture image retrieval

In this paper, a Scale-orientation histogram is defined for analyzing the “directionality” and “periodicity”, which are two of the most important deterministic dimensions in human texture perception. This histogram is applied to texture retrieval in a case study, and the experimental results illustrate its effectiveness.     

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.     

Automatic texture segmentation for content-based image retrieval application

In this article, a brief review on texture segmentation is presented, before a novel automatic texture segmentation algorithm is developed. The algorithm is based on a modified discrete wavelet frames and the mean shift algorithm. The proposed technique is tested on a range of textured images including composite texture images, synthetic texture images, real scene images as well as our main source of images, the museum images of various kinds. An extension to the automatic texture segmentation, a texture identifier is also introduced for integration into a retrieval system, providing an excellent approach to content-based image retrieval using texture features.     

Texture image retrieval using adaptive tetrolet transforms

This paper proposes a novel technique for texture image retrieval based on tetrolet transforms. Tetrolets provide fine texture information due to its different way of analysis. Tetrominoes are applied at each decomposition level of an image and best combination of tetrominoes is selected, which better shows the geometry of an image at each level. All three high pass components of the decomposed image at each level are used as input values for feature extraction. A feature vector is created by taking standard deviation in combination with energy at each subband. Retrieval performance in terms of accuracy is tested on group of texture images taken from benchmark databases: Brodatz and VisTex. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves 78.80% retrieval accuracy on group of texture images D1 (taken from Brodatz), 84.41% on group D2 (taken from VisTex) and 77.41% on rotated texture image group D3 (rotated images from Brodatz).     

Fast K-means algorithm based on a level histogram for image retrieval

In image retrieval, the image feature is the main factor determining accuracy; the color feature is the most important feature and is most commonly used with a K-means algorithm. To create a fast K-means algorithm for this study, first a level histogram of statistics for the image database is made. The level histogram is used with the K-means algorithm for clustering data. A fast K-means algorithm not only shortens the length of time spent on training the image database cluster centers, but it also overcomes the cluster center re-training problem since large numbers of images are continuously added into the database. For the experiment, we use gray and color image database sets for performance comparisons and analyzes, respectively. The results show that the fast K-means algorithm is more effective, faster, and more convenient than the traditional K-means algorithm. Moreover, it overcomes the problem of spending excessive amounts of time on re-training caused by the continuous addition of images to the image database. Selection of initial cluster centers also affects the performance of cluster center training.     

Commercial digital image libraries,digital images and digital discontent

Publications such as consumer magazines rely heavily on image libraries as sources for the images they use in their issues. Traditionally, magazine editorial staff have discussed their image requirements over the telephone with library staff and the library has conducted the search. Many libraries have now developed Web sites and their customers search them for images themselves. A minority have e-commerce capabilities, and enable customers to purchase and download digital images from their sites. This survey found that magazine staff do not often choose to search digital libraries, preferring instead to continue to contact the library by telephone. Most also choose not to buy the use of digital images, but prefer to continue to work with conventional transparencies and slides. The reasons for these preferences, and the reasons they are unlikely to change in the short term, are explored.     

OCRS: an interactive object-based image clustering and retrieval system

In this paper, we propose an Interactive Object-based Image Clustering and Retrieval System (OCRS). The system incorporates two major modules: Preprocessing and Object-based Image Retrieval. In preprocessing, an unsupervised segmentation method called WavSeg is used to segment images into meaningful semantic regions (image objects). This is an area where a huge number of image regions are involved. Therefore, we propose a Genetic Algorithm based algorithm to cluster these images objects and thus reduce the search space for object-based image retrieval. In the learning and retrieval module, the Diverse Density algorithm is adopted to analyze the user’s interest and generate the initial hypothesis which provides a prototype for future learning and retrieval. Relevance Feedback technique is incorporated to provide progressive guidance to the learning process. In interacting with user, we propose to use One-Class Support Vector Machine (SVM) to learn the user’s interest and refine the returned result. Performance is evaluated on a large image database and the effectiveness of our retrieval algorithm is demonstrated through comparative studies.

Visual information retrieval system via content-based approach

In this paper a content-based image retrieval method that can search large image databases efficiently by color, texture, and shape content is proposed. Quantized RGB histograms and the dominant triple (hue, saturation, and value), which are extracted from quantized HSV joint histogram in the local image region, are used for representing global/local color information in the image. Entropy and maximum entry from co-occurrence matrices are used for texture information and edge angle histogram is used for representing shape information. Relevance feedback approach, which has coupled proposed features, is used for obtaining better retrieval accuracy. A new indexing method that supports fast retrieval in large image databases is also presented. Tree structures constructed by k-means algorithm, along with the idea of triangle inequality, eliminate candidate images for similarity calculation between query image and each database image. We find that the proposed method reduces calculation up to average 92.2 percent of the images from direct comparison.     

Color image retrieval using multispectral random field texture model and color content features

This paper describes a color-texture-based image retrieval system for query of an image database to find similar images to a target image. The color-texture information is obtained via modeling with the multispectral simultaneous autoregressive (MSAR) random field model. The general color content characterized by ratios of sample color means is also used. The retrieval process involves segmenting the image into regions of uniform color texture using an unsupervised histogram clustering approach that utilizes the combination of MSAR and color features. The color-texture content, location, area and shape of the segmented regions are used to develop similarity measures describing the closeness of a query image to database images. These attributes are derived from the maximum fitting square and best fitting ellipse to each of the segmented regions. The proposed similarity measure combines all these attributes to rank the closeness of the images. The performance of the system is tested on two databases containing synthetic mosaics of natural textures and natural scenes, respectively.     

Toward Web mining of cross-language query translations in digital libraries

This paper proposes an effective query-translation approach that enables a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) service to be more easily supported in digital library systems that only contain monolingual content. A query-translation engine called LiveTrans is used to process the translation requests of cross-lingual queries from connected digital library systems. To automatically extract translations not covered by standard dictionaries, the engine is developed based on a novel integration of dictionary resources and Web mining approaches, including anchor-text and search-result methods. The engine exploits a broad range of multilingual Web resources used as live bilingual corpora to alleviate translation difficulties. It is shown to be particularly effective for extracting multilingual translation equivalents of query terms containing proper names or new terminology. The obtained results show the feasibility of and great potential for creating English-Chinese CLIR services in existing digital libraries and new applications in cross-language Web searching, although difficulties still remain that need to be investigated further.     

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.     

An application of metadata-based image retrieval system for facility management

For facility management, photography is an efficient and accurate method of recording the physical state of infrastructure. However, without an effective organizational scheme, the difficulty of retrieving relevant photos from historical databases can become overly burdensome for highly complex or long-lived assets. To make strategic decisions, it is crucial to retrieve the right information from a plurality of sources in a timely manner. The main objective of this paper is to present a method for organizing and retrieving photos from massive facility management photo databases using photo-metadata: photographed location, camera perspective, and image semantic content information. Indoor localization experiments were performed using Bluetooth technology to infer the location information. Perspective is inferred from the device’s on-board inertial measurement unit (IMU). Image semantic content is inferred using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based deep learning algorithm. Fusing these three features, seven query options were provided for the user when retrieving images. Leveraging Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a process and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a framework, this paper also envisions a federated information management by connecting 2D and 3D facility assets with our real-world map which can be smoothly bridged with our image retrieval system. The realization of the integrated application with BIM and GIS is significantly beneficial for the facility management domain by advancing the understanding of projects in a broader view with a federated data platform. In this research, the framework is illustrated with 21 institutional buildings within the University of Texas at Austin’s main campus, and the authors conclude that the proposed metadata-based image retrieval system can ultimately enhance the better-informed decision-making process through rapid information retrieval.     

An improved distance-based relevance feedback strategy for image retrieval

Most CBIR (content based image retrieval) systems use relevance feedback as a mechanism to improve retrieval results. NN (nearest neighbor) approaches provide an efficient method to compute relevance scores, by using estimated densities of relevant and non-relevant samples in a particular feature space. In this paper, particularities of the CBIR problem are exploited to propose an improved relevance feedback algorithm based on the NN approach. The resulting method has been tested in a number of different situations and compared to the standard NN approach and other existing relevance feedback mechanisms. Experimental results evidence significant improvements in most cases.     

An algorithm for semi-supervised learning in image retrieval

We study the problem of image retrieval based on semi-supervised learning. Semi-supervised learning has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Different from traditional supervised learning. Semi-supervised learning makes use of both labeled and unlabeled data. In image retrieval, collecting labeled examples costs human efforts, while vast amounts of unlabeled data are often readily available and offer some additional information. In this paper, based on support vector machine (SVM), we introduce a semi-supervised learning method for image retrieval. The basic consideration of the method is that, if two data points are close to each, they should share the same label. Therefore, it is reasonable to search a projection with maximal margin and locality preserving property. We compare our method to standard SVM and transductive SVM. Experimental results show efficiency and effectiveness of our method.     

Hessian optimal design for image retrieval

Recently there has been a considerable interest in active learning from the perspective of optimal experimental design (OED). OED selects the most informative samples to minimize the covariance matrix of the parameters, so that the expected prediction error of the parameters, as well as the model output, can be minimized. Most of the existing OED methods are based on either linear regression or Laplacian regularized least squares (LapRLS) models. Although LapRLS has shown a better performance than linear regression, it suffers from the fact that the solution is biased towards a constant and the lack of extrapolating power. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning algorithm called Hessian optimal design (HOD). HOD is based on the second-order Hessian energy for semi-supervised regression which overcomes the drawbacks of Laplacian based methods. Specifically, HOD selects those samples which minimize the parameter covariance matrix of the Hessian regularized regression model. The experimental results on content-based image retrieval have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach.