GEOMETRY-CONSTRAINED SPATIAL PYRAMID ADAPTATION FOR IMAGE CLASSIFICATION

This paper proposes a geometry-constrained spatial pyramid adaptation approach for the image classification task. Scene geometry is used as an input parameter for generating the spatial pyramid definitions. The resulting region adaptation is performed in accordance with the predefined geometric guidelines and underlying image characteristics. Using an approximate global geometric correspondence, exploits the idea that images of the same category share a spatial similarity. This assumption is evaluated and justified in an object classification framework, in which generated region segments are used as an enhancement to the widely utilized "spatial pyramid" method. Fixed region pyramids are replaced by the proposed locally coherent geometrically consistent region segments. Performance of the proposed method on object classification framework is evaluated on the 20 class Pascal VOC 2007 dataset. The proposed method shows consistent increase in the mean average precision (MAP) score for different experimental scenarios

Effective and efficient kernel-based image representations for classification and retrieval

Image representation is a challenging task. In particular, in order to obtain better performances in different image processing applications such as video surveillance, autonomous driving, crime scene detection and automatic inspection, effective and efficient image representation is a fundamental need. The performance of these applications usually depends on how accurately images are classified into their corresponding groups or how precisely relevant images are retrieved from a database based on a query. Accuracy in image classification and precision in image retrieval depend on the effectiveness of image representation. Existing image representation methods have some limitations. For example, spatial pyramid matching, which is a popular method incorporating spatial information in image-level representation, has not been fully studied to date. In addition, the strengths of pyramid match kernel and spatial pyramid matching are not combined for better image matching. Kernel descriptors based on gradient, colour and shape overcome the limitations of histogram-based descriptors, but suffer from information loss, noise effects and high computational complexity. Furthermore, the combined performance of kernel descriptors has limitations related to computational complexity, higher dimensionality and lower effectiveness. Moreover, the potential of a global texture descriptor which is based on human visual perception has not been fully explored to date. Therefore, in this research project, kernel-based effective and efficient image representation methods are proposed to address the above limitations. An enhancement is made to spatial pyramid matching in terms of improved rotation invariance. This is done by investigating different partitioning schemes suitable to achieve rotation-invariant image representation and the proposal of a weight function for appropriate level contribution in image matching. In addition, the strengths of pyramid match kernel and spatial pyramid are combined to enhance matching accuracy between images. The existing kernel descriptors are modified and improved to achieve greater effectiveness, minimum noise effects, less dimensionality and lower computational complexity. A novel fusion approach is also proposed to combine the information related to all pixel attributes, before the descriptor extraction stage. Existing kernel descriptors are based only on gradient, colour and shape information. In this research project, a texture-based kernel descriptor is proposed by modifying an existing popular global texture descriptor. Finally, all the contributions are evaluated in an integrated system. The performances of the proposed methods are qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated on two to four different publicly available image databases. The experimental results show that the proposed methods are more effective and efficient in image representation than existing benchmark methods.Doctor of Philosoph