An Effective and Efficient Exact Match Retrieval Scheme for Symbolic Image Database Systems Based on Spatial Reasoning: A Logarithmic Search Time Approach

In this paper, a novel method of representing symbolic images in a symbolic image database (SID) invariant to image transformations that is useful for exact match retrieval is presented. The relative spatial relationships existing among the components present in an image are perceived with respect to the direction of reference [15] and preserved by a set of triples. A distinct and unique key is computed for each distinct triple. The mean and standard deviation of the set of keys computed for a symbolic image are stored along with the total number of keys as the representatives of the corresponding image. The proposed exact match retrieval scheme is based on a modified binary search technique and, thus, requires O(log n) search time in the worst case, where n is the total number of symbolic images in the SID. An extensive experimentation on a large database of 22,630 symbolic images is conducted to corroborate the superiority of the model. The effectiveness of the proposed representation scheme is tested with standard testbed images.     

基于自注意力深度哈希的海量指纹索引方法

现有的指纹索引方法大多是基于实数值特征向量,当应用于大规模指纹库时无法避免计算资源与存储空间消耗巨大的问题。为了在海量指纹库中进行高效快速检索并得到实时响应结果,提出了一种全新的基于有监督深度哈希的指纹索引方法。将传统指纹领域知识与自注意力深度哈希模型相结合。传统领域知识用于指纹图像预处理来获取指纹二值骨架图,自注意力深度哈希模型进行特征提取与哈希映射得到二进制编码。其中特征提取模块使用Transformer结构替换卷积神经网络来提取指纹细节特征,此外模型中加入了自动对齐模块并设计了一种STN-AE的结构来辅助训练该模块。最后在NIST4、NIST14、FVC2000、FVC2002、FVC2004等公开指纹数据集上进行了实验,实验结果证实该方法在提高海量指纹库中的检索速度以及降低存储消耗等方面是卓有成效的。     

Iteration-free clustering algorithm for nonstationary image database

Image database systems must effectively and efficiently handle and retrieve images from a large collection of images. A serious problem faced by these systems is the requirement to deal with the nonstationary database. In an image database system, image features are typically organized into an indexing structure, and updating the indexing structure involves many computations. In this paper, this difficult problem is converted into a constrained optimization problem, and the iteration-free clustering (IFC) algorithm based on the Lagrangian function, is presented for adapting the existing indexing structure for a nonstationary database. Experimental results concerning recall and precision indicate that the proposed method provides a binary tree that is almost optimal. Simulation results further demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can maintain 94% precision in seven-dimensional feature space, even when the number of new-coming images is one-half the number of images in the original database. Finally, our IFC algorithm outperforms other methods usually applied to image databases.     

Window Query Processing in Linear Quadtrees

The linear quadtree is a spatial access method that is built by decomposing the spatial objects in a database into quadtree blocks and storing these quadtree blocks in a B-tree. The linear quadtree is very useful for geographic information systems because it provides good query performance while using existing B-tree implementations. An algorithm and a cost model are presented for processing window queries in linear quadtrees. The algorithm can handle query windows of any shape in the general case of spatial databases with overlapping objects. The algorithm recursively decomposes the space into quadtree blocks, and uses the quadtree blocks overlapping the query window to search the B-tree. The cost model estimates the I/O cost of processing window queries using the algorithm. The cost model is also based on a recursive decomposition of the space, and it uses very simple parameters that can easily be maintained in the database catalog. Experiments with real and synthetic data sets verify the accuracy of the cost model.     

Indexing chromatic and achromatic patterns for content-based colour image retrieval

In this paper, we present a method to represent achromatic and chromatic image signals independently for content-based image indexing and retrieval for image database applications. Starting from an opponent colour representation, human colour vision theories and modern digital signal processing technologies are applied to develop a compact and computationally efficient visual appearance model for coloured image patterns. We use the model to compute the statistics of achromatic and chromatic spatial patterns of colour images for indexing and content-based retrieval. Two types of colour images databases, one colour texture database and another photography colour image database are used to evaluate the performance of the developed method in content-based image indexing and retrieval. Experimental results are presented to show that the new method is superior or competitive to state-of-the-art content-based image indexing and retrieval techniques.     

图像中物体空间关系的表示及在检索中的应用

基于图像中物体之间的空间关系的图像检索往往受困于待处理的图像中物体种类和空间位置难以自动准确地获取。文中基于物体识别算法的输出,提出一种对物体空间关系的三元组表示法,给出基于这种表示方法对图像索引、相似度计算和检索排序的方法及允许用户使用查询词和空间关系表达查询需求的二维输入界面,并实现原型系统。这种表示法具有良好的鲁棒性,可容忍物体识别算法一定程度的误差,将物体识别得到的置信度加入三元组表示法置信度计算和排序算法中,减少物体识别结果误差对检索性能的影响。在原型系统上的实验表明,该系统在实验中对包含物体位置关系的检索给出更准确的结果,在NDCG@m、MAP、F@m上均优于现有系统。     

An efficient iconic indexing strategy for image rotation and reflection in image databases

Spatial relationships are important issues for similarity-based retrieval in many image database applications. With the popularity of digital cameras and the related image processing software, a sequence of images are often rotated or flipped. That is, those images are transformed in the rotation orientation or the reflection direction. However, many iconic indexing strategies based on symbolic projection are sensitive to rotation or reflection. Therefore, these strategies may miss the qualified images, when the query is issued in the orientation different from the orientation of the database images. To solve this problem, some researchers proposed a function to map the spatial relationship to its transformed one. However, this mapping consists of several conditional statements, which is time-consuming. Thus, in this paper, we propose an efficient iconic indexing strategy, in which we carefully assign a unique bit pattern to each spatial relationship and record the spatial information based on the bit patterns in a matrix. Without generating the rotated or flipped image, we can directly derive the index of the rotated or flipped image from the index of the original one by bit operations and matrix manipulation. In our performance study, we analyze the time complexity of our proposed strategy and show the efficiency of our proposed strategy according to the simulation results. Moreover, we implement a prototype to validate our proposed strategy.     

Image database design based on 9D-SPA representation for spatial relations

Spatial relationships between objects are important features for designing a content-based image retrieval system. We propose a new scheme, called 9D-SPA representation, for encoding the spatial relations in an image. With this representation, important functions of intelligent image database systems such as visualization, browsing, spatial reasoning, iconic indexing, and similarity retrieval can be easily achieved. The capability of discriminating images based on 9D-SPA representation is much more powerful than any spatial representation method based on minimum bounding rectangles or centroids of objects. The similarity measures using 9D-SPA representation provide a wide range of fuzzy matching capability in similarity retrieval to meet different user's requirements. Experimental results showed that our system is very effective in terms of recall and precision. In addition, the 9D-SPA representation can be incorporated into a two-level index structure to help reduce the search space of each query processing. The experimental results also demonstrated that, on average, only 0.1254 percent /spl sim/ 1.6829 percent of symbolic pictures (depending on various degrees of similarity) were accessed per query in an image database containing 50,000 symbolic pictures.     

Signature file as a spatial filter for iconic image database

The problems of efficient data storage and data retrieval are important issues in the design of image database systems. A data structure called a 2-D string, which represents symbolic pictures preserving spatial knowledge, was proposed by Chang et al. It allows a natural way to construct iconic indexes for pictures. We proposed a data structure 2-D B-string to characterize the spatial knowledge embedded in images. It is powerful enough to describe images with partly overlapping or completely overlapping objects without the need of partitioning objects. When there exist a large volume of complex images in the image database, the processing time for image retrieval is tremendous. It is essential to develop efficient access methods for retrieval. In this paper, access methods, to different extents of precision, for retrieval of desired images encoded in 2-D B-strings are proposed. The signature file acting as a spatial filter of image database is based on disjoint coding and superimposed coding techniques. It provides an efficient way to retrieve images in image databases.     

Content-based Access in Image Database by Quantitative Relationships

In this paper, we describe a novel technique to perform content-based access in image databases using quantitative spatial relationships. Usually, spatial relation-based indexing methods fail if the metric spatial information contained in the images must be preserved. In order to provide a more robust approach to directional relations indexing with respect to metric differences in images, this paper introduces an improvement of the virtual image index, namely quantitative virtual image, using a quantitative methodology. A scalar quantitative measure is associated with each spatial relation, in order to discriminate among images of the image database having the same objects and spatial relationships, but different degree of similarity if we also consider distance relationships. The measure we introduce does not correspond to any significant increase of complexity with respect to the standard virtual image providing a more precise answer set.     

A real-time matching system for large fingerprint databases

With the current rapid growth in multimedia technology, there is an imminent need for efficient techniques to search and query large image databases. Because of their unique and peculiar needs, image databases cannot be treated in a similar fashion to other types of digital libraries. The contextual dependencies present in images, and the complex nature of two-dimensional image data make the representation issues more difficult for image databases. An invariant representation of an image is still an open research issue. For these reasons, it is difficult to find a universal content-based retrieval technique. Current approaches based on shape, texture, and color for indexing image databases have met with limited success. Further, these techniques have not been adequately tested in the presence of noise and distortions. A given application domain offers stronger constraints for improving the retrieval performance. Fingerprint databases are characterized by their large size as well as noisy and distorted query images. Distortions are very common in fingerprint images due to elasticity of the skin. In this paper, a method of indexing large fingerprint image databases is presented. The approach integrates a number of domain-specific high-level features such as pattern class and ridge density at higher levels of the search. At the lowest level, it incorporates elastic structural feature-based matching for indexing the database. With a multilevel indexing approach, we have been able to reduce the search space. The search engine has also been implemented on Splash 2-a field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based array processor to obtain near-ASIC level speed of matching. Our approach has been tested on a locally collected test data and on NIST-9, a large fingerprint database available in the public domain     

一种有效的支持海量图像数据库QBE查询的聚类索引算法

对海量图像数据进行基于内容的查询与检索有赖于高效的索引和检索机制。因此,如何将海量图像数据进行合理的分类,人而建立相应的索引机制就成为了一个亟待解决的问题。本文提出了一种有效的支持海量图像数据库QBE查询的聚类索引算法。实验在1万多幅的图像数据库上进行了反复测试,结果表明该算法可以极大地提高检索效率。     

Expert system design using wavelet and color vocabulary trees for image retrieval

A new image indexing and retrieval system for content based image retrieval (CBIR) is proposed in this paper. The characteristics (vector points) of image are computed using color (color histogram) and SOT (spatial orientation tree). The SOT defines the spatial parent-child relationship among wavelet coefficients in multi-resolution wavelet sub-bands. First the image is divided into sub-blocks and then constructed the SOT for each low pass wavelet coefficient is considered as a vector point of that particular image. Similarly the color histogram features are collected from the each sub-block. The vector points of each image are indexed using vocabulary tree. The retrieval results of the proposed method are tested on different image databases, i.e., natural image database consists of Corel 1000 (DB1), Brodatz texture image database (DB2) and MIT VisTex database (DB3). The results after being investigated show a significant improvement in terms of average precision, average recall and average retrieval rate on DB1 database and average retrieval rate on texture databases (DB2 and DB3) as compared with most of existing techniques on respective databases.     

Image indexing and retrieval based on vector quantization

To effectively utilize information stored in a digital image library, effective image indexing and retrieval techniques are essential. This paper proposes an image indexing and retrieval technique based on the compressed image data using vector quantization (VQ). By harnessing the characteristics of VQ, the proposed technique is able to capture the spatial relationships of pixels when indexing the image. Experimental results illustrate the robustness of the proposed technique and also show that its retrieval performance is higher compared with existing color-based techniques.     

一种适用于汉语的索引文件结构

本文给出一种以词语为索引项的索引文件存储结构,以及基于这种结构的索引查询算法.首先分析中文索引库的分布规律,接着在此基础上设计了一种逆序存储的三层索引结构,这种结构在创建索引时能根据词语频率自动调整存储顺序,最后给出一种基于自动机和逆向最大匹配的索引查询算法.实验系统TIFS将三层索引结构与B树、哈希方法在时间和空间复杂度方面进行对比,结果表明,对于大规模的中文文本检索,三层索引结构的综合效果最好.     

Incremental indexing with binary feature based Tversky index using black hole entropic fuzzy clustering in cloud computing

Due to the large volume of computational and storage requirements of content based image retrieval (CBIR), outsourcing image to cloud providers become an attractive research. Even though, the cloud service provides efficient indexing of the condensed images, it remains a major issue in the process of incremental indexing. Hence, an effective incremental indexing mechanism named Black Hole Entropic Fuzzy Clustering +Deep stacked incremental indexing (BHEFC+deep stacked incremental indexing) is proposed in this paper to perform incremental indexing through the retrieval of images. The images are encrypted and stored in cloud server for ensuring the security of image retrieval process. The trained images are clustered using the clustering mechanism BHEFC based on Tversky index. With the incremental indexing process, the new training images are encrypted and are converted into the decimal form such that the weight is computed using deep stacked auto-encoder that enable to update the centroid with new score values. The experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets shows that the proposed BHEFC+deep stacked incremental indexing model achieves better results compared to the existing methods by obtaining maximum accuracy of 96.728%, maximum F-measure of 83.598%, maximum precision of 84.447%, and maximum recall of 94.817%, respectively.

     

Structural feature indexing for retrieval of partially visible shapes

Efficient and robust information retrieval from large image databases is an essential functionality for the reuse, manipulation, and editing of multimedia documents. Structural feature indexing is a potential approach to efficient shape retrieval from large image databases, but the indexing is sensitive to noise, scales of observation, and local shape deformations. It has now been confirmed that efficiency of classification and robustness against noise and local shape transformations can be improved by the feature indexing approach incorporating shape feature generation techniques (Nishida, Comput. Vision Image Understanding 73 (1) (1999) 121-136). In this paper, based on this approach, an efficient, robust method is presented for retrieval of model shapes that have parts similar to the query shape presented to the image database. The effectiveness is confirmed by experimental trials with a large database of boundary contours obtained from real images, and is validated by systematically designed experiments with a large number of synthetic data.     

SemQuery: semantic clustering and querying on heterogeneous features for visual data

The effectiveness of content-based image retrieval can be enhanced using heterogeneous features embedded in the images. However, since the features in texture, color, and shape are generated using different computation methods and thus may require different similarity measurements, the integration of the retrievals on heterogeneous features is a nontrivial task. We present a semantics-based clustering and indexing approach, termed SemQuery, to support visual queries on heterogeneous features of images. Using this approach, the database images are classified based on their heterogeneous features. Each semantic image cluster contains a set of subclusters that are represented by the heterogeneous features that the images contain. An image is included in a semantic cluster if it falls within the scope of all the heterogeneous clusters of the semantic cluster. We also design a neural network model to merge the results of basic queries on individual features. A query processing strategy is then presented to support visual queries on heterogeneous features. An experimental analysis is conducted and presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.     

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.