12,058 research outputs found
HD-Index: Pushing the Scalability-Accuracy Boundary for Approximate kNN Search in High-Dimensional Spaces
Nearest neighbor searching of large databases in high-dimensional spaces is
inherently difficult due to the curse of dimensionality. A flavor of
approximation is, therefore, necessary to practically solve the problem of
nearest neighbor search. In this paper, we propose a novel yet simple indexing
scheme, HD-Index, to solve the problem of approximate k-nearest neighbor
queries in massive high-dimensional databases. HD-Index consists of a set of
novel hierarchical structures called RDB-trees built on Hilbert keys of
database objects. The leaves of the RDB-trees store distances of database
objects to reference objects, thereby allowing efficient pruning using distance
filters. In addition to triangular inequality, we also use Ptolemaic inequality
to produce better lower bounds. Experiments on massive (up to billion scale)
high-dimensional (up to 1000+) datasets show that HD-Index is effective,
efficient, and scalable.Comment: PVLDB 11(8):906-919, 201
Toward Entity-Aware Search
As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability
Multi modal multi-semantic image retrieval
PhDThe rapid growth in the volume of visual information, e.g. image, and video can
overwhelm users’ ability to find and access the specific visual information of interest
to them. In recent years, ontology knowledge-based (KB) image information retrieval
techniques have been adopted into in order to attempt to extract knowledge from these
images, enhancing the retrieval performance. A KB framework is presented to
promote semi-automatic annotation and semantic image retrieval using multimodal
cues (visual features and text captions). In addition, a hierarchical structure for the KB
allows metadata to be shared that supports multi-semantics (polysemy) for concepts.
The framework builds up an effective knowledge base pertaining to a domain specific
image collection, e.g. sports, and is able to disambiguate and assign high level
semantics to ‘unannotated’ images.
Local feature analysis of visual content, namely using Scale Invariant Feature
Transform (SIFT) descriptors, have been deployed in the ‘Bag of Visual Words’
model (BVW) as an effective method to represent visual content information and to
enhance its classification and retrieval. Local features are more useful than global
features, e.g. colour, shape or texture, as they are invariant to image scale, orientation
and camera angle. An innovative approach is proposed for the representation,
annotation and retrieval of visual content using a hybrid technique based upon the use
of an unstructured visual word and upon a (structured) hierarchical ontology KB
model. The structural model facilitates the disambiguation of unstructured visual
words and a more effective classification of visual content, compared to a vector
space model, through exploiting local conceptual structures and their relationships.
The key contributions of this framework in using local features for image
representation include: first, a method to generate visual words using the semantic
local adaptive clustering (SLAC) algorithm which takes term weight and spatial
locations of keypoints into account. Consequently, the semantic information is
preserved. Second a technique is used to detect the domain specific ‘non-informative
visual words’ which are ineffective at representing the content of visual data and
degrade its categorisation ability. Third, a method to combine an ontology model with
xi
a visual word model to resolve synonym (visual heterogeneity) and polysemy
problems, is proposed. The experimental results show that this approach can discover
semantically meaningful visual content descriptions and recognise specific events,
e.g., sports events, depicted in images efficiently.
Since discovering the semantics of an image is an extremely challenging problem, one
promising approach to enhance visual content interpretation is to use any associated
textual information that accompanies an image, as a cue to predict the meaning of an
image, by transforming this textual information into a structured annotation for an
image e.g. using XML, RDF, OWL or MPEG-7. Although, text and image are distinct
types of information representation and modality, there are some strong, invariant,
implicit, connections between images and any accompanying text information.
Semantic analysis of image captions can be used by image retrieval systems to
retrieve selected images more precisely. To do this, a Natural Language Processing
(NLP) is exploited firstly in order to extract concepts from image captions. Next, an
ontology-based knowledge model is deployed in order to resolve natural language
ambiguities. To deal with the accompanying text information, two methods to extract
knowledge from textual information have been proposed. First, metadata can be
extracted automatically from text captions and restructured with respect to a semantic
model. Second, the use of LSI in relation to a domain-specific ontology-based
knowledge model enables the combined framework to tolerate ambiguities and
variations (incompleteness) of metadata. The use of the ontology-based knowledge
model allows the system to find indirectly relevant concepts in image captions and
thus leverage these to represent the semantics of images at a higher level.
Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly enhances image
retrieval and leads to narrowing of the semantic gap between lower level machinederived
and higher level human-understandable conceptualisation
Using Apache Lucene to Search Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors
Surrogate Text Representation (STR) is a profitable solution to efficient
similarity search on metric space using conventional text search engines, such
as Apache Lucene. This technique is based on comparing the permutations of some
reference objects in place of the original metric distance. However, the
Achilles heel of STR approach is the need to reorder the result set of the
search according to the metric distance. This forces to use a support database
to store the original objects, which requires efficient random I/O on a fast
secondary memory (such as flash-based storages). In this paper, we propose to
extend the Surrogate Text Representation to specifically address a class of
visual metric objects known as Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD).
This approach is based on representing the individual sub-vectors forming the
VLAD vector with the STR, providing a finer representation of the vector and
enabling us to get rid of the reordering phase. The experiments on a publicly
available dataset show that the extended STR outperforms the baseline STR
achieving satisfactory performance near to the one obtained with the original
VLAD vectors.Comment: In Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Computer Vision,
Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2016) -
Volume 4: VISAPP, p. 383-39
- …