Modeling of remote sensing image content using attributed relational graphs

Automatic content modeling and retrieval in remote sensing image databases are important and challenging problems. Statistical pattern recognition and computer vision algorithms concentrate on feature-based analysis and representations in pixel or region levels whereas syntactic and structural techniques focus on modeling symbolic representations for interpreting scenes. We describe a hybrid hierarchical approach for image content modeling and retrieval. First, scenes are decomposed into regions using pixel-based classifiers and an iterative split-and-merge algorithm. Next, spatial relationships of regions are computed using boundary, distance and orientation information based on different region representations. Finally, scenes are modeled using attributed relational graphs that combine region class information and spatial arrangements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in query scenarios that cannot be expressed by traditional approaches but where the proposed models can capture both feature and spatial characteristics of scenes and can retrieve similar areas according to their high-level semantic content. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

Semantic Concept Co-Occurrence Patterns for Image Annotation and Retrieval.

Describing visual image contents by semantic concepts is an effective and straightforward way to facilitate various high level applications. Inferring semantic concepts from low-level pictorial feature analysis is challenging due to the semantic gap problem, while manually labeling concepts is unwise because of a large number of images in both online and offline collections. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically generate intermediate image descriptors by exploiting concept co-occurrence patterns in the pre-labeled training set that renders it possible to depict complex scene images semantically. Our work is motivated by the fact that multiple concepts that frequently co-occur across images form patterns which could provide contextual cues for individual concept inference. We discover the co-occurrence patterns as hierarchical communities by graph modularity maximization in a network with nodes and edges representing concepts and co-occurrence relationships separately. A random walk process working on the inferred concept probabilities with the discovered co-occurrence patterns is applied to acquire the refined concept signature representation. Through experiments in automatic image annotation and semantic image retrieval on several challenging datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed concept co-occurrence patterns as well as the concept signature representation in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches

Context-aware person identification in personal photo collections

Identifying the people in photos is an important need for users of photo management systems. We present MediAssist, one such system which facilitates browsing, searching and semi-automatic annotation of personal photos, using analysis of both image content and the context in which the photo is captured. This semi-automatic annotation includes annotation of the identity of people in photos. In this paper, we focus on such person annotation, and propose person identification techniques based on a combination of context and content. We propose language modelling and nearest neighbor approaches to context-based person identification, in addition to novel face color and image color content-based features (used alongside face recognition and body patch features). We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of these techniques using the real private photo collections of a number of users, and show that combining context- and content-based analysis improves performance over content or context alone

Hybrid image representation methods for automatic image annotation: a survey

In most automatic image annotation systems, images are represented with low level features using either global methods or local methods. In global methods, the entire image is used as a unit. Local methods divide images into blocks where fixed-size sub-image blocks are adopted as sub-units; or into regions by using segmented regions as sub-units in images. In contrast to typical automatic image annotation methods that use either global or local features exclusively, several recent methods have considered incorporating the two kinds of information, and believe that the combination of the two levels of features is beneficial in annotating images. In this paper, we provide a survey on automatic image annotation techniques according to one aspect: feature extraction, and, in order to complement existing surveys in literature, we focus on the emerging image annotation methods: hybrid methods that combine both global and local features for image representation

A study into annotation ranking metrics in geo-tagged image corpora

Community contributed datasets are becoming increasingly common in automated image annotation systems. One important issue with community image data is that there is no guarantee that the associated metadata is relevant. A method is required that can accurately rank the semantic relevance of community annotations. This should enable the extracting of relevant subsets from potentially noisy collections of these annotations. Having relevant, non heterogeneous tags assigned to images should improve community image retrieval systems, such as Flickr, which are based on text retrieval methods. In the literature, the current state of the art approach to ranking the semantic relevance of Flickr tags is based on the widely used tf-idf metric. In the case of datasets containing landmark images, however, this metric is inefficient due to the high frequency of common landmark tags within the data set and can be improved upon. In this paper, we present a landmark recognition framework, that provides end-to-end automated recognition and annotation. In our study into automated annotation, we evaluate 5 alternate approaches to tf-idf to rank tag relevance in community contributed landmark image corpora. We carry out a thorough evaluation of each of these ranking metrics and results of this evaluation demonstrate that four of these proposed techniques outperform the current commonly-used tf-idf approach for this task

Evaluation of Deep Convolutional Nets for Document Image Classification and Retrieval

This paper presents a new state-of-the-art for document image classification and retrieval, using features learned by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In object and scene analysis, deep neural nets are capable of learning a hierarchical chain of abstraction from pixel inputs to concise and descriptive representations. The current work explores this capacity in the realm of document analysis, and confirms that this representation strategy is superior to a variety of popular hand-crafted alternatives. Experiments also show that (i) features extracted from CNNs are robust to compression, (ii) CNNs trained on non-document images transfer well to document analysis tasks, and (iii) enforcing region-specific feature-learning is unnecessary given sufficient training data. This work also makes available a new labelled subset of the IIT-CDIP collection, containing 400,000 document images across 16 categories, useful for training new CNNs for document analysis

Structured Knowledge Representation for Image Retrieval

We propose a structured approach to the problem of retrieval of images by content and present a description logic that has been devised for the semantic indexing and retrieval of images containing complex objects. As other approaches do, we start from low-level features extracted with image analysis to detect and characterize regions in an image. However, in contrast with feature-based approaches, we provide a syntax to describe segmented regions as basic objects and complex objects as compositions of basic ones. Then we introduce a companion extensional semantics for defining reasoning services, such as retrieval, classification, and subsumption. These services can be used for both exact and approximate matching, using similarity measures. Using our logical approach as a formal specification, we implemented a complete client-server image retrieval system, which allows a user to pose both queries by sketch and queries by example. A set of experiments has been carried out on a testbed of images to assess the retrieval capabilities of the system in comparison with expert users ranking. Results are presented adopting a well-established measure of quality borrowed from textual information retrieval