Comparative Study and Optimization of Feature-Extraction Techniques for Content based Image Retrieval

The aim of a Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system, also known as Query by Image Content (QBIC), is to help users to retrieve relevant images based on their contents. CBIR technologies provide a method to find images in large databases by using unique descriptors from a trained image. The image descriptors include texture, color, intensity and shape of the object inside an image. Several feature-extraction techniques viz., Average RGB, Color Moments, Co-occurrence, Local Color Histogram, Global Color Histogram and Geometric Moment have been critically compared in this paper. However, individually these techniques result in poor performance. So, combinations of these techniques have also been evaluated and results for the most efficient combination of techniques have been presented and optimized for each class of image query. We also propose an improvement in image retrieval performance by introducing the idea of Query modification through image cropping. It enables the user to identify a region of interest and modify the initial query to refine and personalize the image retrieval results.Comment: 8 pages, 16 figures, 11 table

The aceToolbox: low-level audiovisual feature extraction for retrieval and classification

In this paper we present an overview of a software platform that has been developed within the aceMedia project, termed the aceToolbox, that provides global and local lowlevel feature extraction from audio-visual content. The toolbox is based on the MPEG-7 eXperimental Model (XM), with extensions to provide descriptor extraction from arbitrarily shaped image segments, thereby supporting local descriptors reflecting real image content. We describe the architecture of the toolbox as well as providing an overview of the descriptors supported to date. We also briefly describe the segmentation algorithm provided. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the toolbox in the context of two different content processing scenarios: similarity-based retrieval in large collections and scene-level classification of still images

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

КОМПЬЮТЕРИЗИРОВАННАЯ ДИАГНОСТИКА МЕЛАНОМЫ НА БАЗЕ ПОИСКА ПОХОЖИХ ДЕРМАТОСКОПИЧЕСКИХ ИЗОБРАЖЕНИЙ В БАЗЕ ДАННЫХ

A method for computer-aided diagnosis of skin lesions based on image retrieval scheme is proposed. The suggested method is rather simple, reliable and robust. The results of the tests carried out on a publically available image dataset suggest that the performance of the method proposed is comparable with one of a rather complicated conventional method of melanoma diagnosis. The best performance is achieved when combining both methods together. Предлагается метод решения задачи компьютеризированной диагностики новообразований кожи, основанный на поиске изображений в базе данных по содержанию. Предложенный метод отличается достаточной простотой, надежностью, меньшей зависимостью от настроек аппаратуры. При тестировании на открытой базе данных дерматоскопических изображений метод поиска показал результаты, по точности сравнимые с результатами работы гораздо более сложного классического метода. Наилучшее качество диагностики достигалась при комбинировании двух методов.

Automated interpretation of benthic stereo imagery

Autonomous benthic imaging, reduces human risk and increases the amount of collected data. However, manually interpreting these high volumes of data is onerous, time consuming and in many cases, infeasible. The objective of this thesis is to improve the scientific utility of the large image datasets. Fine-scale terrain complexity is typically quantified by rugosity and measured by divers using chains and tape measures. This thesis proposes a new technique for measuring terrain complexity from 3D stereo image reconstructions, which is non-contact and can be calculated at multiple scales over large spatial extents. Using robots, terrain complexity can be measured without endangering humans, beyond scuba depths. Results show that this approach is more robust, flexible and easily repeatable than traditional methods. These proposed terrain complexity features are combined with visual colour and texture descriptors and applied to classifying imagery. New multi-dataset feature selection methods are proposed for performing feature selection across multiple datasets, and are shown to improve the overall classification performance. The results show that the most informative predictors of benthic habitat types are the new terrain complexity measurements. This thesis presents a method that aims to reduce human labelling effort, while maximising classification performance by combining pre-clustering with active learning. The results support that utilising the structure of the unlabelled data in conjunction with uncertainty sampling can significantly reduce the number of labels required for a given level of accuracy. Typically 0.00001–0.00007% of image data is annotated and processed for science purposes (20–50 points in 1–2% of the images). This thesis proposes a framework that uses existing human-annotated point labels to train a superpixel-based automated classification system, which can extrapolate the classified results to every pixel across all the images of an entire survey

Automated interpretation of benthic stereo imagery

Autonomous benthic imaging, reduces human risk and increases the amount of collected data. However, manually interpreting these high volumes of data is onerous, time consuming and in many cases, infeasible. The objective of this thesis is to improve the scientific utility of the large image datasets. Fine-scale terrain complexity is typically quantified by rugosity and measured by divers using chains and tape measures. This thesis proposes a new technique for measuring terrain complexity from 3D stereo image reconstructions, which is non-contact and can be calculated at multiple scales over large spatial extents. Using robots, terrain complexity can be measured without endangering humans, beyond scuba depths. Results show that this approach is more robust, flexible and easily repeatable than traditional methods. These proposed terrain complexity features are combined with visual colour and texture descriptors and applied to classifying imagery. New multi-dataset feature selection methods are proposed for performing feature selection across multiple datasets, and are shown to improve the overall classification performance. The results show that the most informative predictors of benthic habitat types are the new terrain complexity measurements. This thesis presents a method that aims to reduce human labelling effort, while maximising classification performance by combining pre-clustering with active learning. The results support that utilising the structure of the unlabelled data in conjunction with uncertainty sampling can significantly reduce the number of labels required for a given level of accuracy. Typically 0.00001–0.00007% of image data is annotated and processed for science purposes (20–50 points in 1–2% of the images). This thesis proposes a framework that uses existing human-annotated point labels to train a superpixel-based automated classification system, which can extrapolate the classified results to every pixel across all the images of an entire survey