Image annotation by semi-supervised cross-domain learning with group sparsity

With the explosive growth of multimedia data in the web, multi-label image annotation has been attracted more and more attention. Although the amount of available data is large and growing, the number of labeled data is quite small. This paper proposes an approach to utilize both unlabeled data in target domain and labeled data in auxiliary domain to boost the performance of image annotation. Moreover, since different kinds of heterogeneous features in images have different intrinsic discriminative power for image understanding, group sparsity is introduced in our approach to effectively utilize those heterogeneous visual features with data of target and auxiliary domains. We call this approach semi-supervised cross-domain learning with group sparsity (S²CLGS). The strength of the proposed S²CLGS method for multi-label image annotation is to integrate semi-supervised discriminant analysis, cross-domain learning and sparse coding together. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of S²CLGS in comparison with other image annotation algorithms.     

基于Matlab的图像自动标注

图像自动标注在检索大量数字图像时起到关键作用,它能将图像的视觉特征转化为图像的标注字信息,为用户的使用及检索带来极大的方便。研究了图像自动语义标注方法,设计并实现了基于Matlab图像自动标注系统,能够提取图像颜色特征和纹理特征,与已标注图像进行相似性度量并标注出图像语义关键词     

基于偏序结构的图像标注

图像标注旨在为图像分配一系列的语义标签描述图像的内容。针对高级语义与低级特征之间的语义鸿沟问题,本文提出了基于偏序结构的图像标注方法。首先,计算训练图像与测试图像的相似性得分,得到测试图像的初始邻近集及邻近标签;然后通过构建的属性偏序结构,获得邻近标签的相关语义,提高标签的丰富度,以及利用构建的对象偏序结构,得到最终的候选集。为了提高标注的准确率,设置一个频率阈值筛选出频率较高的标签作为最终的关键词。通过实验证明,实验结果有效地提高了标注的准确率和召回率。      

Image reconstruction with locally adaptive sparsity and nonlocal robust regularization

Sparse representation based modeling has been successfully used in many image-related inverse problems such as deblurring, super-resolution and compressive sensing. The heart of sparse representations lies on how to find a space (spanned by a dictionary of atoms) where the local image patch exhibits high sparsity and how to determine the image local sparsity. To identify the locally varying sparsity, it is necessary to locally adapt the dictionary learning process and the sparsity-regularization parameters. However, spatial adaptation alone runs into the risk of over-fitting the data because variation and invariance are two sides of the same coin. In this work, we propose two sets of complementary ideas for regularizing image reconstruction process: (1) the sparsity regularization parameters are locally estimated for each coefficient and updated along with adaptive learning of PCA-based dictionaries; (2) a nonlocal self-similarity constraint is introduced into the overall cost functional to improve the robustness of the model. An efficient alternative minimization algorithm is present to solve the proposed objective function and then an effective image reconstruction algorithm is presented. The experimental results on image deblurring, super-resolution and compressive sensing demonstrate that the proposed image reconstruct method outperforms many existing image reconstruction methods in both PSNR and visual quality assessment.     

Image annotation based on multi-view robust spectral clustering

Nowadays, image annotation has been a hot topic in the semantic retrieval field due to the abundant growth of digital images. The purpose of these methods is to realize the content of images and assign appropriate keywords to them. Extensive efforts have been conducted in this field, which effectiveness is limited between low-level image features and high-level semantic concepts. In this paper, we propose a Multi-View Robust Spectral Clustering (MVRSC) method, which tries to model the relationship between semantic and multi-features of training images based on the Maximum Correntropy Criterion. A Half-Quadratic optimization framework is used to solve the objective function. According to the constructed model, a few tags are suggested based on a novel decision-level fusion distance. The stability condition and bound calculation of MVRSC are analyzed, as well. Experimental results on real-world Flickr and 500PX datasets, and Corel5K confirm the superiority of the proposed method over other competing models.     

Saliency detection by multitask sparsity pursuit

This paper addresses the problem of detecting salient areas within natural images. We shall mainly study the problem under unsupervised setting, i.e., saliency detection without learning from labeled images. A solution of multitask sparsity pursuit is proposed to integrate multiple types of features for detecting saliency collaboratively. Given an image described by multiple features, its saliency map is inferred by seeking the consistently sparse elements from the joint decompositions of multiple-feature matrices into pairs of low-rank and sparse matrices. The inference process is formulated as a constrained nuclear norm and as an l(2, 1)-norm minimization problem, which is convex and can be solved efficiently with an augmented Lagrange multiplier method. Compared with previous methods, which usually make use of multiple features by combining the saliency maps obtained from individual features, the proposed method seamlessly integrates multiple features to produce jointly the saliency map with a single inference step and thus produces more accurate and reliable results. In addition to the unsupervised setting, the proposed method can be also generalized to incorporate the top-down priors obtained from supervised environment. Extensive experiments well validate its superiority over other state-of-the-art methods.     

Image annotation using high order statistics in non-Euclidean spaces

Automatic image annotation is a promising way to achieve more effective image retrieval and image analysis by using keywords associated to the image content. Due to the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts of an image, however, the performances of many existing algorithms are not so satisfactory. In this paper, a novel image classification scheme, named high order statistics based maximum a posterior (HOS-MAP), is proposed to deal with the issue of image annotation. To bridge the gap between human judgment and machine intelligence, the proposed scheme first constructs a dissimilarity representation for each image in a non-Euclidean space; then, the information of dissimilarity diffusion distribution for each image is achieved with respect to the high-order statistics of a triplet of nearest neighbor images; finally, a maximum a posteriori algorithm with the information of Gaussian Mixture Model and dissimilarity diffusion distribution is adopted to estimate the relevance between each annotation and an input un-annotated image. Experimental results on a general-purpose image database demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed automatic image annotation scheme.     

基于Logistic映射和z-映射的图像分组加密算法

针对图像加密,提出了一种基于Logistic映射和z-映射的图像分组加密算法,该算法在每一轮迭代中,交替使用矩阵置乱、非线性数值替换和数值关联混迭三级操作。经大量实验验证,该算法能够有效抵抗明文攻击、差分攻击、统计分析,密钥空间较大,因而安全性较高,并且加解密速度相当快,适用于数据存储。     

Image denoising using combined higher order non-convex total variation with overlapping group sparsity

Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing - It is widely known that the total variation image restoration suffers from the stair casing artifacts which results in blocky restored images. In...     

Video compressed sensing reconstruction based on structural group sparsity and successive approximation estimation model

The existing video compressed sensing (CS) algorithms for inconsistent sampling ignore the joint correlations of video signals in space and time, and their reconstruction quality and speed need further improvement. To balance reconstruction quality with computational complexity, we introduce a structural group sparsity model for use in the initial reconstruction phase and propose a weight-based group sparse optimization algorithm acting in joint domains. Then, a coarse-to-fine optical flow estimation model with successive approximation is introduced for use in the interframe prediction stage to recover non-key frames through alternating optical flow estimation and residual sparse reconstruction. Experimental results show that, compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed algorithm achieves a peak signal-to-noise ratio gain of 1–3 dB and a multi-scale structural similarity gain of 0.01–0.03 at a low time complexity, and the reconstructed frames not only have good edge contours but also retain textural details.     

Image distance metric learning based on neighborhood sets for automatic image annotation

Since there is semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level image semantic, the performance of many existing content-based image annotation algorithms is not satisfactory. In order to bridge the gap and improve the image annotation performance, a novel automatic image annotation (AIA) approach using neighborhood set (NS) based on image distance metric learning (IDML) algorithm is proposed in this paper. According to IDML, we can easily obtain the neighborhood set of each image since obtained image distance can effectively measure the distance between images for AIA task. By introducing NS, the proposed AIA approach can predict all possible labels of the image without caption. The experimental results confirm that the introduction of NS based on IDML can improve the efficiency of AIA approaches and achieve better annotation performance than the existing AIA approaches.     

基于视觉语义主题与反馈日志的图像自动标注

为了提高图像标注性能,提出了一种基于视觉语义主题与反馈日志的图像自动标注方法。首 先,提取图像 前景与背景区域,分别进行处理;其次,基于WordNet构建标注词之间的语义关系模型,并 结合概率潜在语义分析(PLSA) 与高斯混合模型(GMM)建立图像底层特征、视觉语义主题与标注     

Image annotation using multi-view non-negative matrix factorization with different number of basis vectors

Automatic Image Annotation (AIA) helps image retrieval systems by predicting tags for images. In this paper, we propose an AIA system using Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) framework. The NMF framework discovers a latent space, by factorizing data into a set of non-negative basis and coefficients. To model the images, multiple features are extracted, each one represents images from a specific view. We use multi-view graph regularization NMF and allow NMF to choose a different number of basis vectors for each view. For tag prediction, each test image is mapped onto the multiple latent spaces. The distances of images in these spaces are used to form a unified distance matrix. The weights of distances are learned automatically. Then a search-based method is used to predict tags based on tags of nearest neighbors’. We evaluate our method on three datasets and show that it is competitive with the current state-of-the-art methods.     

Delineating buildings by grouping lines with MRFs

Traditionally, Markov random field (MRF) models have been used in low-level image analysis. The article presents an MRF-based scheme to perform object delineation. The proposed edge-based approach involves extracting straight lines from the edge map of an image. Then, an MRF model is used to group these lines to delineate buildings in aerial images.     

利用空域稀疏性的L型阵下二维波达方向估计

针对稀疏重构应用于二维波达方向估计时存在计算量大的问题,从减少过完备字典的原子个数以及求解模型的阶数这两个方面入手,提出一种具有较低计算复杂度的基于稀疏重构的二维波达方向估计方法。该方法中首先根据L型阵的结构特点,对基于阵列接收数据的稀疏线性模型进行分解和重新组合,抛弃与信源无关的原子,大大减少了原子个数;其次,提出利用多快拍数据协方差矩阵的最大特征值对应的特征向量作为待分解信号建立稀疏模型,使模型阶数从快拍数降至一阶。此外,给出了新方法的详细实施步骤,并且对其计算复杂度进行了理论分析。新方法估计精度高,并且能够自动实现俯仰角和方位角配对。最后,通过计算机仿真验证了新方法的有效性。     

Image classification based on complex wavelet structural similarity

Complex wavelet structural similarity (CW-SSIM) index has been recognized as a novel image similarity measure of broad potential applications due to its robustness to small geometric distortions such as translation, scaling and rotation of images. Nevertheless, how to make the best use of it in image classification problems has not been deeply investigated. In this paper, we introduce a series of novel image classification algorithms based on CW-SSIM and use handwritten digit recognition, and face recognition as examples for demonstration. Among the proposed approaches, the best compromise between accuracy and complexity is obtained by the CW-SSIM support vector machine based algorithms, which combines an unsupervised clustering method to divide the training images into clusters with representative images and a supervised learning method based on support vector machines to maximize the classification accuracy. Our experiments show that such a conceptually simple image classification method, which does not involve any registration, intensity normalization or sophisticated feature extraction processes, and does not rely on any modeling of the image patterns or distortion processes, achieves competitive performance with reduced computational cost.     

一种基于HWD结构相似的图像质量评价方法

针对传统图像质量评价方法峰值信噪比PSNR和结构相似度SSIM没有充分考虑人眼视觉特性,所得结果有时并不能与人眼的视觉所感知到的实际质量一致的问题,通过对图像结构相似度和人眼视觉系统的研究,文中提出了一种新的基于HWD结构相似的图像质量评价方法。首先对图像进行Hybrid Wavelets and Directional Filter Banks(HWD)分解,提取图像不同频带不同方向上的信息,然后计算各子带结构相似度,最后综合人眼视觉特性的CSF得到图像质量评价值。实验结果表明文中方法相比峰值信噪比PSNR、结构相似度SSIM算法具有更高的准确性和良好的相关性,可以更好的评价图像质量。     

Image quality assessment using a SVD-based structural projection

The development of objective image quality assessment (IQA) metrics aligned with human perception is of fundamental importance to numerous image-processing applications. Recently, human visual system (HVS)-based engineering algorithms have received widespread attention for their low computational complexity and good performance. In this paper, we propose a new IQA model by incorporating these available engineering principles. A local singular value decomposition (SVD) is first utilised as a structural projection tool to select local image distortion features, and then, both perceptual spatial pooling and neural networks (NN) are employed to combine feature vectors to predict a single perceptual quality score. Extensive experiments and cross-validations conducted with three publicly available IQA databases demonstrate the accuracy, consistency, robustness, and stability of the proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art IQA methods, such as Visual Information Fidelity (VIF), Visual Signal to Noise Ratio (VSNR), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM).     

Testing (non-)existence of input-output relationships by estimating fractal dimensions

Our aim is to propose tests for (non-)existence of nonlinear relationships between signals, which, after passing a test, can be interpreted as input and output signals of a certain system, if its characteristic is sufficiently smooth. The proposed tests are based on the theoretical results on equality of fractal dimensions of these signals as well as on estimation of fractal dimensions from observations. They are applicable when at least one of these signals has the fractal dimensions strictly larger than one, i.e., it is rough enough. The tests are then verified on simulated data. Their applicability is illustrated by two sets of real data, namely, observations of two financial time series and samples of displacement-force signals in a magneto-hydrological damper.