PicToSeek: combining color and shape invariant features for imageretrieval

We aim at combining color and shape invariants for indexing and retrieving images. To this end, color models are proposed independent of the object geometry, object pose, and illumination. From these color models, color invariant edges are derived from which shape invariant features are computed. Computational methods are described to combine the color and shape invariants into a unified high-dimensional invariant feature set for discriminatory object retrieval. Experiments have been conducted on a database consisting of 500 images taken from multicolored man-made objects in real world scenes. From the theoretical and experimental results it is concluded that object retrieval based on composite color and shape invariant features provides excellent retrieval accuracy. Object retrieval based on color invariants provides very high retrieval accuracy whereas object retrieval based entirely on shape invariants yields poor discriminative power. Furthermore, the image retrieval scheme is highly robust to partial occlusion, object clutter and a change in the object's pose. Finally, the image retrieval scheme is integrated into the PicToSeek system on-line at http://www.wins.uva.nl/research/isis/PicToSeek/ for searching images on the World Wide Web.     

Texture-based image indexing in the process of lossless data compression

The authors describe a new approach for content-based image indexing and retrieval by extracting texture features from the process of image compression via JPEG-LS. Since the compression technique adopted incorporates local edge detection to formulate predictive values for pixels being encoded, the texture features extracted by the proposed algorithms are also capable of describing image content in terms of edges and shapes of local objects without adding any significant complexity to the original JPEG-LS. While lossless data compression helps in saving storage space automatically for image databases, the extensive experiments also show that this type of feature extraction produces better retrieval results in comparison with existing similar indexing techniques which are carried out without data compression.     

An automatic algorithm for semantic object generation and temporal tracking

Automatic semantic video object extraction is an important step for providing content-based video coding, indexing and retrieval. However, it is very difficult to design a generic semantic video object extraction technique, which can provide variant semantic video objects by using the same function. Since the presence and absence of persons in an image sequence provide important clues about video content, automatic face detection and human being generation are very attractive for content-based video database applications. For this reason, we propose a novel face detection and semantic human object generation algorithm. The homogeneous image regions with accurate boundaries are first obtained by integrating the results of color edge detection and region growing procedures. The human faces are detected from these homogeneous image regions by using skin color segmentation and facial filters. These detected faces are then used as object seed for semantic human object generation. The correspondences of the detected faces and semantic human objects along time axis are further exploited by a contour-based temporal tracking procedure.     

Depth map misalignment correction and dilation for DIBR view synthesis

The quality of the synthesized views by Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map, especially the alignment of object boundaries of texture image. In practice, the misalignment of sharp depth map edges is the major cause of the annoying artifacts at the disoccluded regions of the synthesized views. Conventional smooth filter approach blurs the depth map to reduce the disoccluded regions. The drawbacks are the degradation of 3D perception of the reconstructed 3D videos and the destruction of the texture in background regions. Conventional edge preserving filter utilizes the color image information in order to align the depth edges with color edges. Unfortunately, the characteristics of color edges and depth edges are very different which causes annoying boundaries artifacts in the synthesized virtual views. Recent solution of reliability-based approach uses reliable warping information from other views to fill the holes. However, it is not suitable for the view synthesis in video-plus-depth based DIBR applications. In this paper, a new depth map preprocessing approach is proposed. It utilizes Watershed color segmentation method to correct the depth map misalignment and then the depth map object boundaries are extended to cover the transitional edge regions of color image. This approach can handle the sharp depth map edges lying inside or outside the object boundaries in 2D sense. The quality of the disoccluded regions of the synthesized views can be significantly improved and unknown depth values can also be estimated. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance for view synthesis by DIBR especially for generating large baseline virtual views.     

一种改进的综合BTC颜色矩和DT-CWT的图像检索算法

摘 要：特征提取是基于内容的图像检索中的关键技术。针对基于单一特征检索效果不理想的问题,提出一种改进的综合颜色和纹理特征的图像检索算法。该算法在YIQ颜色空间中进行特征提取,首先结合方块编码（BTC）的思想,提取颜色矩作为颜色特征;采用双树复小波变换（DT-CWT）提取纹理特征,融合两种特征并利用相似性度量方式进行图像检索。实验结果表明算法所提取的颜色、纹理特征更利于检索,使用综合特征检索的平均查准率比同类算法更高。     

基于嵌入式零树小波编码直方图图像检索

图像和视频应用的快速增长，使得根据图像和视频内容进行查询的技术变得越来越重要，人们提出了许多基于像素域或压缩域的图像检索技术，因为多媒体数据库通常具有相当大的数据量，所以基于像素域图像检索技术的计算复杂度相当大，因此，许多文献提出更快的基于压缩域的图像检索技术，本文提出一种改进的基于嵌入式零树小波编码直方图的图像检索技术，特征提取综合考虑图像的颜色，纹理，频率和空间信息，所有的特征可以在压缩过程中自动得到，图像检索的过程就是匹配待检索图像和来自数据库的侯选图像的索引，实验证明这种方法具有好的检索性能。     

基于颜色索引相关统计的彩色图像特征提取

提出了一种基于颜色索引相关统计的彩色图像特征提取(CILCS)方法。图像的像素颜色值被稀疏表示成类似直方图的索引形式,将相关计算应用到特征提取中,计算图像颜色分布规律在局部和整体的相关性,并结合数值统计最终得到具有一定旋转、尺度和平移不变特性的特征向量,能更有效地表示颜色纹理特征。经图像检索和图像分类的实验表明,本文方法能有效提高图像检索和图像分类的精确度。     

Boosting image object retrieval and indexing by automatically discovered pseudo-objects

State-of-the-art object retrieval systems are mostly based on the bag-of-visual-words representation which encodes local appearance information of an image in a feature vector. An image object search is performed by comparing query object’s feature vector with those for database images. However, a database image vector generally carries mixed information of the entire image which may contain multiple objects and background. Search quality is degraded by such noisy (or diluted) feature vectors. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel representation, pseudo-objects – a subset of proximate feature points with its own feature vector to represent a local area, to approximate candidate objects in database images. In this paper, we investigate effective methods (e.g., grid, G-means, and GMM–BIC) to estimate pseudo-objects. Additionally, we also confirm that the pseudo-objects can significantly benefit inverted-file indexing both in accuracy and efficiency. Experimenting over two consumer photo benchmarks, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art object retrieval and indexing algorithms.     

融合矢量量化与LBP的图像检索算法

基于内容的图像检索算法一直是图像领域研究的热门课题,因此提出一种新的融合矢量量化与LBP的图像检索算法。首先,将彩色图像转化到HSI颜色空间,进行矢量量化编码,统计图像码字出现的频数,形成颜色直方图,完成颜色特征的提取;然后,再将彩色图像转化成灰度图像,利用局部二进制模式(LBP)算法提取纹理特征;最后,相似度计算采用颜色特征和纹理特征相似度加权平均,并且改变颜色特征和纹理特征的权值,多次实验,得到使查准率最高的权值。实验结果表明,算法能有效地提升图像检索性能。     

基于内容的图像检索系统的实现

将小波变换有效地运用于对图像的颜色和纹理特征的提取，并提出了一种将小波变换与图像分块结合起来提取颜色特征的方法，开发出一个综合运用颜色、纹理特征及相关反馈技术进行图像检索的系统。实验结果表明，该系统具有明显的优越性和通用性。     

Preferential Image Segmentation Using Trees of Shapes

A novel preferential image segmentation method is proposed that performs image segmentation and object recognition using mathematical morphologies. The method preferentially segments objects that have intensities and boundaries similar to those of objects in a database of prior images. A tree of shapes is utilized to represent the content distributions in images, and curve matching is applied to compare the boundaries. The algorithm is invariant to contrast change and similarity transformations of translation, rotation and scale. A performance evaluation of the proposed method using a large image dataset is provided. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is promising for applications such as object segmentation and video tracking with cluttered backgrounds.      

Texture Recognition and Image Retrieval Using Gradient Indexing

Our starting point is gradient indexing, the characterization of texture by a feature vector that comprises a histogram derived from the image gradient field. We investigate the use of gradient indexing for texture recognition and image retrieval. We find that gradient indexing is a robust measure with respect to the number of bins and to the choice of the gradient operator. We also find that the gradient direction and magnitude are equally effective in recognizing different textures. Furthermore, a variant of gradient indexing called local activity spectrum is proposed and shown to have improved performance. Local activity spectrum is employed in an image retrieval system as the texture statistic. The retrieval system is based on a segmentation technique employing a distance measure called Sum of Minimum Distance. This system enables content-based retrieval of database images from templates of arbitrary size.     

基于特征融合的粒子滤波目标跟踪新方法

针对传统粒子滤波(PF)算法采用单一颜色特征建模 跟踪目标性能差的缺陷,提出一种颜色特征与纹理特 征相融合的PF目标跟踪新算法。首先,采用一种具有抗噪声和保护纹理边缘的全局中值二值 模式 (GMBP)纹理算子,对模板图像进行局部差绝对值处理,得到幅 值序列模板,将幅值序列模板内的中值作为模板的阈值,与模板邻域比较获得新的纹理图像 ;然后,与 具有光照不变特性的局部二值模式(LBP)纹理算子结合,形成一种(GMLBP)新的纹理描述算子 。最后,分别计算GMLBP纹理特征粒子权值和HSV颜色特征粒子权 值,并依据权值大小确定融合系数,对纹理特征粒子权值和颜色特征粒子权值进行线 性融合,再对融合后粒子权值进行归一化处理,从而得到目标位置状态的最终估计值。对比 实验结果表明, 相对于单一颜色特征的目标跟踪算法,所提算法捕捉目标位置准确且具有更低的平均跟踪误 差,其平均误差降低了近2倍。     

Efficient object-based surveillance image search using spatial pooling of convolutional features

Modern surveillance networks are large collections of computational sensor nodes, where each node can be programmed to capture, prioritize, segment salient objects, and transmit them to central repositories for indexing. Visual data from such networks grow exponentially and present many challenges concerning their transmission, storage, and retrieval. Searching for particular surveillance objects is a common but challenging task. In this paper, we present an efficient features extraction framework which utilizes an optimal subset of kernels from the first layer of a convolutional neural network pre-trained on ImageNet dataset for object-based surveillance image search. The input image is convolved with the set of kernels to generate feature maps, which are aggregated into a single feature map using a novel spatial maximal activator pooling approach. A low-dimensional feature vector is computed to represent surveillance objects. The proposed system provides improvements in both performance and efficiency over other similar approaches for surveillance datasets.     

Image retrieval using both color and texture features

In order to improve the retrieval performance of images, this paper proposes an efficient approach for extracting and retrieving color images. The block diagram of our proposed approach to content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is given firstly, and then we introduce three image feature extracting arithmetic including color histogram, edge histogram and edge direction histogram, the histogram Euclidean distance, cosine distance and histogram intersection are used to measure the image level similarity. On the basis of using color and texture features separately, a new method for image retrieval using combined features is proposed. With the test for an image database including 766 general-purpose images and comparison and analysis of performance evaluation for features and similarity measures, our proposed retrieval approach demonstrates a promising performance. Experiment shows that combined features are superior to every single one of the three features in retrieval.     

Content-based image retrieval using a fusion of global and local features

Color, texture, and shape act as important information for images in human recognition. For content-based image retrieval, many studies have combined color, texture, and shape features to improve the retrieval performance. However, there have not been many powerful methods for combining all color, texture, and shape features. This study proposes a content-based image retrieval method that uses the combined local and global features of color, texture, and shape. The color features are extracted from the color autocorrelogram; the texture features are extracted from the magnitude of a complete local binary pattern and the Gabor local correlation revealing local image characteristics; and the shape features are extracted from singular value decomposition that reflects global image characteristics. In this work, an experiment is performed to compare the proposed method with those that use our partial features and some existing techniques. The results show an average precision that is 19.60% higher than those of existing methods and 9.09% higher than those of recent ones. In conclusion, our proposed method is superior over other methods in terms of retrieval performance.     

Perceptual Image Indexing and Retrieval

We describe a perceptual approach to generating features for use in indexing and retrieving images from an image database. Salient regions that immediately attract the eye are large color regions that usually dominate an image. Features derived from these will allow search for images that are similar perceptually. We compute color features and Gabor color texture features on regions obtained from a multiscale representation of the image, generated by a multiband smoothing algorithm based on human psychophysical measurements of color appearance. The combined feature vector is then used for indexing all salient regions of an image. For retrieval, those images are selected that contain more similar regions to the query image by using a multipass retrieval and ranking mechanism. Matches are found using the L₂ metric. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performs very well.     

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...