243 research outputs found
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Semantics and statistics for automated image annotation
Automated image annotation consists of a number of techniques that aim to find the correlation between words and image features such as colour, shape, and texture to provide correct annotation words to images. In particular, approaches based on Bayesian theory use machine-learning techniques to learn statistical models from a training set of pre-annotated images and apply them to generate annotations for unseen images.
The focus of this thesis lies in demonstrating that an approach, which goes beyond learning the statistical correlation between words and visual features and also exploits information about the actual semantics of the words used in the annotation process, is able to improve the performance of probabilistic annotation systems. Specifically, I present three experiments. Firstly, I introduce a novel approach that automatically refines the annotation words generated by a non-parametric density estimation model using semantic relatedness measures. Initially, I consider semantic measures based on co-occurrence of words in the training set. However, this approach can exhibit limitations, as its performance depends on the quality and coverage provided by the training data. For this reason, I devise an alternative solution that combines semantic measures based on knowledge sources, such as WordNet and Wikipedia, with word co-occurrence in the training set and on the web, to achieve statistically significant results over the baseline. Secondly, I investigate the effect of using semantic measures inside an evaluation measure that computes the performance of an automated image annotation system, whose annotation words adopt the hierarchical structure of an ontology. This is the case of the ImageCLEF2009 collection. Finally, I propose a Markov Random Field that exploits the semantic context dependencies of the image. The best result obtains a mean average precision of 0.32, which is consistent with the state-of-the-art in automated image annotation for the Corel 5k dataset.
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Confluence of Vision and Natural Language Processing for Cross-media Semantic Relations Extraction
In this dissertation, we focus on extracting and understanding semantically meaningful relationships between data items of various modalities; especially relations between images and natural language. We explore the ideas and techniques to integrate such cross-media semantic relations for machine understanding of large heterogeneous datasets, made available through the expansion of the World Wide Web. The datasets collected from social media websites, news media outlets and blogging platforms usually contain multiple modalities of data. Intelligent systems are needed to automatically make sense out of these datasets and present them in such a way that humans can find the relevant pieces of information or get a summary of the available material. Such systems have to process multiple modalities of data such as images, text, linguistic features, and structured data in reference to each other. For example, image and video search and retrieval engines are required to understand the relations between visual and textual data so that they can provide relevant answers in the form of images and videos to the users\u27 queries presented in the form of text. We emphasize the automatic extraction of semantic topics or concepts from the data available in any form such as images, free-flowing text or metadata. These semantic concepts/topics become the basis of semantic relations across heterogeneous data types, e.g., visual and textual data. A classic problem involving image-text relations is the automatic generation of textual descriptions of images. This problem is the main focus of our work. In many cases, large amount of text is associated with images. Deep exploration of linguistic features of such text is required to fully utilize the semantic information encoded in it. A news dataset involving images and news articles is an example of this scenario. We devise frameworks for automatic news image description generation based on the semantic relations of images, as well as semantic understanding of linguistic features of the news articles
Analysis of category co-occurrence in Wikipedia networks
Wikipedia has seen a huge expansion of content since its inception. Pages within this online
encyclopedia are organised by assigning them to one or more categories, where Wikipedia
maintains a manually constructed taxonomy graph that encodes the semantic relationship
between these categories. An alternative, called the category co-occurrence graph, can be
produced automatically by linking together categories that have pages in common. Properties
of the latter graph and its relationship to the former is the concern of this thesis.
The analytic framework, called t-component, is introduced to formalise the graphs and
discover category clusters connecting relevant categories together. The m-core, a cohesive
subgroup concept as a clustering model, is used to construct a subgraph depending on the
number of shared pages between the categories exceeding a given threshold t. The significant
of the clustering result of the m-core is validated using a permutation test. This is compared
to the k-core, another clustering model.
TheWikipedia category co-occurrence graphs are scale-free with a few category hubs and
the majority of clusters are size 2. All observed properties for the distribution of the largest
clusters of the category graphs obey power-laws with decay exponent averages around 1.
As the threshold t of the number of shared pages is increased, eventually a critical threshold
is reached when the largest cluster shrinks significantly in size. This phenomena is only
exhibited for the m-core but not the k-core. Lastly, the clustering in the category graph
is shown to be consistent with the distance between categories in the taxonomy graph
Large-scale image collection cleansing, summarization and exploration
A perennially interesting topic in the research field of large scale image collection organization is how to effectively and efficiently conduct the tasks of image cleansing, summarization and exploration. The primary objective of such an image organization system is to enhance user exploration experience with redundancy removal and summarization operations on large-scale image collection. An ideal system is to discover and utilize the visual correlation among the images, to reduce the redundancy in large-scale image collection, to organize and visualize the structure of large-scale image collection, and to facilitate exploration and knowledge discovery.
In this dissertation, a novel system is developed for exploiting and navigating large-scale image collection. Our system consists of the following key components: (a) junk image filtering by incorporating bilingual search results; (b) near duplicate image detection by using a coarse-to-fine framework; (c) concept network generation and visualization; (d) image collection summarization via dictionary learning for sparse representation; and (e) a multimedia practice of graffiti image retrieval and exploration.
For junk image filtering, bilingual image search results, which are adopted for the same keyword-based query, are integrated to automatically identify the clusters for the junk images and the clusters for the relevant images. Within relevant image clusters, the results are further refined by removing the duplications under a coarse-to-fine structure. The duplicate pairs are detected with both global feature (partition based color histogram) and local feature (CPAM and SIFT Bag-of-Word model). The duplications are detected and removed from the data collection to facilitate further exploration and visual correlation analysis. After junk image filtering and duplication removal, the visual concepts are further organized and visualized by the proposed concept network. An automatic algorithm is developed to generate such visual concept network which characterizes the visual correlation between image concept pairs. Multiple kernels are combined and a kernel canonical correlation analysis algorithm is used to characterize the diverse visual similarity contexts between the image concepts. The FishEye visualization technique is implemented to facilitate the navigation of image concepts through our image concept network. To better assist the exploration of large scale data collection, we design an efficient summarization algorithm to extract representative examplars. For this collection summarization task, a sparse dictionary (a small set of the most representative images) is learned to represent all the images in the given set, e.g., such sparse dictionary is treated as the summary for the given image set. The simulated annealing algorithm is adopted to learn such sparse dictionary (image summary) by minimizing an explicit optimization function.
In order to handle large scale image collection, we have evaluated both the accuracy performance of the proposed algorithms and their computation efficiency. For each of the above tasks, we have conducted experiments on multiple public available image collections, such as ImageNet, NUS-WIDE, LabelMe, etc. We have observed very promising results compared to existing frameworks. The computation performance is also satisfiable for large-scale image collection applications. The original intention to design such a large-scale image collection exploration and organization system is to better service the tasks of information retrieval and knowledge discovery. For this purpose, we utilize the proposed system to a graffiti retrieval and exploration application and receive positive feedback
Using Context Awareness to Improve Domain-Specific Named Entity Disambiguation
In this project we designed and implemented a system based on the Learning To Rank framework to perform Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) of ancient author names and work titles being parts of canonical bibliographic citations. The data is made of abstracts extracted from modern publications in the context of Classical Studies.
We had to deal with domain specific challenges like the small set of available anno- tated data, the high level of ambiguity of the citations and a specific knowledge base which does not include the common properties of the knowledge bases usually used in state-of-the-art NED systems like Wikipedia.
Finally our system improved the already implemented baseline system and reached a F1 score of 77.62% (+7.1%) and 71.88% accuracy (+10.2%). We also demonstrated how we can further improve the disambiguation by exploiting the co-occurrence probability of entities extracted from the corpus. With this method we improved our system by 6.8% in terms of accuracy on a sub-set of 59 documents
Structural learning for large scale image classification
To leverage large-scale collaboratively-tagged (loosely-tagged) images for training a large number of classifiers to support large-scale image classification, we need to develop new frameworks to deal with the following issues: (1) spam tags, i.e., tags are not relevant to the semantic of the images; (2) loose object tags, i.e., multiple object tags are loosely given at the image level without their locations in the images; (3) missing object tags, i.e. some object tags are missed due to incomplete tagging; (4) inter-related object classes, i.e., some object classes are visually correlated and their classifiers need to be trained jointly instead of independently; (5) large scale object classes, which requires to limit the computational time complexity for classifier training algorithms as well as the storage spaces for intermediate results.
To deal with these issues, we propose a structural learning framework which consists of the following key components: (1) cluster-based junk image filtering to address the issue of spam tags; (2) automatic tag-instance alignment to address the issue of loose object tags; (3) automatic missing object tag prediction; (4) object correlation network for inter-class visual correlation characterization to address the issue of missing tags; (5) large-scale structural learning with object correlation network for enhancing the discrimination power of object classifiers.
To obtain enough numbers of labeled training images, our proposed framework leverages the abundant web images and their social tags. To make those web images usable, tag cleansing has to be done to neutralize the noise from user tagging preferences, in particularly junk tags, loose tags and missing tags. Then a discriminative learning algorithm is developed to train a large number of inter-related classifiers for achieving large-scale image classification, e.g., learning a large number of classifiers for categorizing large-scale images into a large number of inter-related object classes and image concepts. A visual concept network is first constructed for organizing enumorus object classes and image concepts according to their inter-concept visual correlations. The visual concept network is further used to: (a) identify inter-related learning tasks for classifier training; (b) determine groups of visually-similar object classes and image concepts; and (c) estimate the learning complexity for classifier training. A large-scale discriminative learning algorithm is developed for supporting multi-class classifier training and achieving accurate inter-group discrimination and effective intra-group separation. Our discriminative learning algorithm can significantly enhance the discrimination power of the classifiers and dramatically reduce the computational cost for large-scale classifier training
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