A unified framework for image database clustering and content-based retrieval

With the proliferation of image data, the need to search and retrieve images efficiently and accurately from a large image database or a collection of image databases has drastically increased. To address such a demand, a unified framework called Markov Model Mediators (MMMs) is proposed in this paper to facilitate conceptual database clustering and to improve the query processing performance by analyzing the summarized knowledge. The unique characteristics of MMMs are that it provides the capabilities of exploring the affinity relations among the images at the database level and among the databases at the cluster level respectively, using an effective data mining process. At the database level, each database is modeled by an intra-database MMM which enables accurate image retrieval within the database. Then the conceptual database clustering is performed and cluster-level knowledge summarization is conducted to reduce the cost of retrieving images across the databases. This framework has been tested using a set of image databases, which contain various numbers of images with different dimensions and concept categories. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves better retrieval accuracy via inter-cluster retrieval than that of intra-cluster retrieval with minimal extra effort

A unified framework for image database clustering and content-based retrieval

With the proliferation of image data, the need to search and retrieve images efficiently and accurately from a large image database or a collection of image databases has drastically increased. To address such a demand, a unified framework called Markov Model Mediators (MMMs) is proposed in this paper to facilitate conceptual database clustering and to improve the query processing performance by analyzing the summarized knowledge. The unique characteristics of MMMs are that it provides the capabilities of exploring the affinity relations among the images at the database level and among the databases at the cluster level respectively, using an effective data mining process. At the database level, each database is modeled by an intra-database MMM which enables accurate image retrieval within the database. Then the conceptual database clustering is performed and cluster-level knowledge summarization is conducted to reduce the cost of retrieving images across the databases. This framework has been tested using a set of image databases, which contain various numbers of images with different dimensions and concept categories. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves better retrieval accuracy via inter-cluster retrieval than that of intra-cluster retrieval with minimal extra effort

Knowledge assisted data management and retrieval in multimedia database sistems

With the proliferation of multimedia data and ever-growing requests for multimedia applications, there is an increasing need for efficient and effective indexing, storage and retrieval of multimedia data, such as graphics, images, animation, video, audio and text. Due to the special characteristics of the multimedia data, the Multimedia Database management Systems (MMDBMSs) have emerged and attracted great research attention in recent years. Though much research effort has been devoted to this area, it is still far from maturity and there exist many open issues. In this dissertation, with the focus of addressing three of the essential challenges in developing the MMDBMS, namely, semantic gap, perception subjectivity and data organization, a systematic and integrated framework is proposed with video database and image database serving as the testbed. In particular, the framework addresses these challenges separately yet coherently from three main aspects of a MMDBMS: multimedia data representation, indexing and retrieval. In terms of multimedia data representation, the key to address the semantic gap issue is to intelligently and automatically model the mid-level representation and/or semi-semantic descriptors besides the extraction of the low-level media features. The data organization challenge is mainly addressed by the aspect of media indexing where various levels of indexing are required to support the diverse query requirements. In particular, the focus of this study is to facilitate the high-level video indexing by proposing a multimodal event mining framework associated with temporal knowledge discovery approaches. With respect to the perception subjectivity issue, advanced techniques are proposed to support users’ interaction and to effectively model users’ perception from the feedback at both the image-level and object-level