一种基于视觉单词的图像检索方法

基于内容的图像检索技术最主要的问题是图像的低层特征和高层语义之间存在着"语义鸿沟"。受文本内容分析的启发,有研究学者借鉴传统词典中用文本单词组合解释术语的思路,将图像视为视觉单词的组合,利用一系列视觉单词的组合来描述图像的语义内容。为此,利用SIFT进行图像的视觉单词特征提取,然后构建视觉单词库,最后实现了一个基于视觉单词的图像检索系统。实验结果表明,该方法在一定程度上提高了图像检索的查准率。     

A soft image representation approach by exploiting local neighborhood structure of self-organizing map (SOM)

When images are described with visual words based on vector quantization of low-level color, texture, and edge-related visual features of image regions, it is usually referred as “bag-of-visual words (BoVW)”-based presentation. Although it has proved to be effective for image representation similar to document representation in text retrieval, the hard image encoding approach based on one-to-one mapping of regions to visual words is not expressive enough to characterize the image contents with higher level semantics and prone to quantization error. Each word is considered independent of all the words in this model. However, it is found that the words are related and their similarity of occurrence in documents can reflect the underlying semantic relations between them. To consider this, a soft image representation scheme is proposed by spreading each region’s membership values through a local fuzzy membership function in a neighborhood to all the words in a codebook generated by self-organizing map (SOM). The topology preserving property of the SOM map is exploited to generate a local membership function. A systematic evaluation of retrieval results of the proposed soft representation on two different image (natural photographic and medical) collections has shown significant improvement in precision at different recall levels when compared to different low-level and “BoVW”-based feature that consider only probability of occurrence (or presence/absence) of a word.     

一种结合语义特征和视觉特征的图像检索方法

为了解决传统的CBIR系统中存在的"语义鸿沟"问题,提出一种结合语义特征和视觉特征的图像检索方法.将图像的语义特征和视觉特征数据结合到同一个索引向量中,进行基于内容的图像检索.系统使用潜在语义索引(LSI)技术提取图像的语义特征,提取颜色直方图作为图像的视觉特征.通过将图像底层视觉特征与图像在向量空间中的语义统计特征相...     

增量学习语义属性的图像内容检索系统增强

大规模图像内容检索是实现图像语义信息获取的重要手段, 其首要需解决图像低层特征与用户高层语义间的语义鸿沟问题。针对该问题, 引入图像语义属性, 并结合增量分类学习方法(online core vector machine, OCVM), 提出了一种增量构建大规模图像内容检索系统的新方法。该方法借助检索反馈学习机制可以提升图像语义属性的辨别准确性, 能在扩张图像库规模的同时, 提升图像内容检索的可靠性。实验结果表明了上述方法的有效性, 其检索性能可逐步地达到离线构建方法的最佳性能, 但具有更好的可扩展性和自提升能力。     

Robust image retrieval with hidden classes

For the purpose of content-based image retrieval (CBIR), image classification is important to help improve the retrieval accuracy and speed of the retrieval process. However, the CBIR systems that employ image classification suffer from the problem of hidden classes. The queries associated with hidden classes cannot be accurately answered using a traditional CBIR system. To address this problem, a robust CBIR scheme is proposed that incorporates a novel query detection technique and a self-adaptive retrieval strategy. A number of experiments carried out on the two popular image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

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.     

Collaborative image retrieval via regularized metric learning

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), relevant images are identified based on their similarities to query images. Most CBIR algorithms are hindered by the semantic gap between the low-level image features used for computing image similarity and the high-level semantic concepts conveyed in images. One way to reduce the semantic gap is to utilize the log data of users' feedback that has been collected by CBIR systems in history, which is also called “collaborative image retrieval.” In this paper, we present a novel metric learning approach, named “regularized metric learning,” for collaborative image retrieval, which learns a distance metric by exploring the correlation between low-level image features and the log data of users' relevance judgments. Compared to the previous research, a regularization mechanism is used in our algorithm to effectively prevent overfitting. Meanwhile, we formulate the proposed learning algorithm into a semidefinite programming problem, which can be solved very efficiently by existing software packages and is scalable to the size of log data. An extensive set of experiments has been conducted to show that the new algorithm can substantially improve the retrieval accuracy of a baseline CBIR system using Euclidean distance metric, even with a modest amount of log data. The experiment also indicates that the new algorithm is more effective and more efficient than two alternative algorithms, which exploit log data for image retrieval.     

Similarity learning for texture image retrieval using multiple classifier system

Multiple Classifier System has found its applications in many areas such as handwriting recognition, speaker recognition, medical diagnosis, fingerprint recognition, personal identification and others. However, there have been rare attempts to develop content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system that uses multiple classifiers to learn visual similarity. Texture as a primitive visual content is often used in many important applications (viz. Medical image analysis and medical CBIR system). In this paper, a texture image retrieval system is developed that learns the visual similarity in terms of class membership using multiple classifiers. The way proposed approach combines the decisions of multiple classifiers to obtain final class memberships of query for each of the output classes is also a novel concept. A modified distance that is weighted with the membership values obtained through similarity learning is used for ranking. Three different algorithms are proposed for the retrieval of images against a query image displaying the strength of multiple classifier approach, class membership score and their interplay to achieve the objective defined in terms of simplicity, retrieval effectiveness and speed. The proposed methods based on multiple classifiers achieve higher retrieval accuracy with lower standard deviation compared to all the competing methods irrespective of the texture database and feature set used. The multiple classifier retrieval schemes proposed here is tested for texture image retrieval. However, these can be used for any other challenging retrieval problems.     

基于贝叶斯分类器的图像检索相关反馈算法

由于图像底层特征及其本身所包含的上层语义信息的巨大差距,使得基于内容的图像检索很难取得令人满意的效果.作为一种有效的解决方案,在过去的几年中,相关反馈在该研究领域取得了一定的成功.提出了一种新的具有学习能力的反馈算法.该算法基于贝叶斯分类原理,运用不同的反馈策略分别处理正、负反馈,同时它具有学习能力,可以运用用户的反馈信息不断地修正检索参数,使系统的检索能力得到不断的提高.通过在大图片库上的检索实验 ,该算法产生的效果大大优于当前其他的反馈方法.     

Content-based image retrieval by using tree-structured features and multi-layer self-organizing map

A new approach for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is described. In this study, a tree-structured image representation together with a multi-layer self-organizing map (MLSOM) is proposed for efficient image retrieval. In the proposed tree-structured image representation, a root node contains the global features, while child nodes contain the local region-based features. This approach hierarchically integrates more information of image contents to achieve better retrieval accuracy compared with global and region features individually. MLSOM in the proposed method provides effective compression and organization of tree-structured image data. This enables the retrieval system to operate at a much faster rate than that of directly comparing query images with all images in databases. The proposed method also adopts a relevance feedback scheme to improve the retrieval accuracy by a respectable level. Our obtained results indicate that the proposed image retrieval system is robust against different types of image alterations. Comparative results corroborate that the proposed CBIR system is promising in terms of accuracy, speed and robustness.     

Hidden annotation for image retrieval with long-term relevance feedback learning

Hidden annotation (HA) is an important research issue in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We propose to incorporate long-term relevance feedback (LRF) with HA to increase both efficiency and retrieval accuracy of CBIR systems. The work contains two parts. (1) Through LRF, a multi-layer semantic representation is built to automatically extract hidden semantic concepts underlying images. HA with these concepts alleviates the burden of manual annotation and avoids the ambiguity problem of keyword-based annotation. (2) For each learned concept, semi-supervised learning is incorporated to automatically select a small number of candidate images for annotators to annotate, which improves efficiency of HA.     

Neighborhood preserving regression for image retrieval

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), relevance feedback has been proven to be a powerful tool for bridging the gap between low level visual features and high level semantic concepts. Traditionally, relevance feedback driven CBIR is often considered as a supervised learning problem where the user provided feedbacks are used to learn a distance metric or classification function. However, CBIR is intrinsically a semi-supervised learning problem in which the testing samples (images in the database) are present during the learning process. Moreover, when there are no sufficient feedbacks, these methods may suffer from the overfitting problem. In this paper, we propose a novel neighborhood preserving regression algorithm which makes efficient use of both labeled and unlabeled images. By using the unlabeled images, the geometrical structure of the image space can be incorporated into the learning system through a regularizer. Specifically, from all the functions which minimize the empirical loss on the labeled images, we select the one which best preserves the local neighborhood structure of the image space. In this way, our method can obtain a regression function which respects both semantic and geometrical structures of the image database. We present experimental evidence suggesting that our algorithm is able to use unlabeled data effectively for image retrieval.     

Content-based image retrieval using growing hierarchical self-organizing quadtree map

In this paper, a growing hierarchical self-organizing quadtree map (GHSOQM) is proposed and used for a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system. The incorporation of GHSOQM in a CBIR system organizes images in a hierarchical structure. The retrieval time by GHSOQM is less than that by using direct image comparison using a flat structure. Furthermore, the ability of incremental learning enables GHSOQM to be a prospective neural-network-based approach for CBIR systems. We also propose feature matrices, image distance and relevance feedback for region-based images in the GHSOQM-based CBIR system. Experimental results strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.     

A multiple instance learning based framework for semantic image segmentation

Most image segmentation algorithms extract regions satisfying visual uniformity criteria. Unfortunately, because of the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantics, such regions usually do not correspond to meaningful parts. This has motivated researchers to develop methods that, by introducing high-level knowledge into the segmentation process, can break through the performance ceiling imposed by the semantic gap. The main disadvantage of those methods is their lack of flexibility due to the assumption that such knowledge is provided in advance. In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), relevance feedback (RF) learning has been successfully applied as a technique aimed at reducing the semantic gap. Inspired by this, we present a RF-based CBIR framework that uses multiple instance learning to perform a semantically-guided context adaptation of segmentation parameters. A partial instantiation of this framework that uses mean shift-based segmentation is presented. Experiments show the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed framework on real images.     

Automatic Annotation and Retrieval of Images

Although a variety of techniques have been developed for content-based image retrieval (CBIR), automatic image retrieval by semantics still remains a challenging problem. We propose a novel approach for semantics-based image annotation and retrieval. Our approach is based on the monotonic tree model. The branches of the monotonic tree of an image, termed as structural elements, are classified and clustered based on their low level features such as color, spatial location, coarseness, and shape. Each cluster corresponds to some semantic feature. The category keywords indicating the semantic features are automatically annotated to the images. Based on the semantic features extracted from images, high-level (semantics-based) querying and browsing of images can be achieved. We apply our scheme to analyze scenery features. Experiments show that semantic features, such as sky, building, trees, water wave, placid water, and ground, can be effectively retrieved and located in images.     

Vector space model adaptation and pseudo relevance feedback for content-based image retrieval

Image retrieval is an important problem for researchers in computer vision and content-based image retrieval (CBIR) fields. Over the last decades, many image retrieval systems were based on image representation as a set of extracted low-level features such as color, texture and shape. Then, systems calculate similarity metrics between features in order to find similar images to a query image. The disadvantage of this approach is that images visually and semantically different may be similar in the low level feature space. So, it is necessary to develop tools to optimize retrieval of information. Integration of vector space models is one solution to improve the performance of image retrieval. In this paper, we present an efficient and effective retrieval framework which includes a vectorization technique combined with a pseudo relevance model. The idea is to transform any similarity matching model (between images) to a vector space model providing a score. A study on several methodologies to obtain the vectorization is presented. Some experiments have been undertaken on Wang, Oxford5k and Inria Holidays datasets to show the performance of our proposed framework.     

A probabilistic semantic model for image annotation and multi-modal image retrieval

This paper addresses automatic image annotation problem and its application to multi-modal image retrieval. The contribution of our work is three-fold. (1) We propose a probabilistic semantic model in which the visual features and the textual words are connected via a hidden layer which constitutes the semantic concepts to be discovered to explicitly exploit the synergy among the modalities. (2) The association of visual features and textual words is determined in a Bayesian framework such that the confidence of the association can be provided. (3) Extensive evaluation on a large-scale, visually and semantically diverse image collection crawled from Web is reported to evaluate the prototype system based on the model. In the proposed probabilistic model, a hidden concept layer which connects the visual feature and the word layer is discovered by fitting a generative model to the training image and annotation words through an Expectation-Maximization (EM) based iterative learning procedure. The evaluation of the prototype system on 17,000 images and 7736 automatically extracted annotation words from crawled Web pages for multi-modal image retrieval has indicated that the proposed semantic model and the developed Bayesian framework are superior to a state-of-the-art peer system in the literature.