Image mining: trends and developments

[Abstract]: Advances in image acquisition and storage technology have led to tremendous growth in very large and detailed image databases. These images, if analyzed, can reveal useful information to the human users. Image mining deals with the extraction of implicit knowledge, image data relationship, or other patterns not explicitly stored in the images. Image mining is more than just an extension of data mining to image domain. It is an interdisciplinary endeavor that draws upon expertise in computer vision, image processing, image retrieval, data mining, machine learning, database, and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we will examine the research issues in image mining, current developments in image mining, particularly, image mining frameworks, state-of-the-art techniques and systems. We will also identify some future research directions for image mining

An information-driven framework for image mining

[Abstract]: Image mining systems that can automatically extract semantically meaningful information (knowledge) from image data are increasingly in demand. The fundamental challenge in image mining is to determine how low-level, pixel representation contained in a raw image or image sequence can be processed to identify high-level spatial objects and relationships. To meet this challenge, we propose an efficient information-driven framework for image mining. We distinguish four levels of information: the Pixel Level, the Object Level, the Semantic Concept Level, and the Pattern and Knowledge Level. High-dimensional indexing schemes and retrieval techniques are also included in the framework to support the flow of information among the levels. We believe this framework represents the first step towards capturing the different levels of information present in image data and addressing the issues and challenges of discovering useful patterns/knowledge from each level

Image mining: issues, frameworks and techniques

[Abstract]: Advances in image acquisition and storage technology have led to tremendous growth in significantly large and detailed image databases. These images, if analyzed, can reveal useful information to the human users. Image mining deals with the extraction of implicit knowledge, image data relationship, or other patterns not explicitly stored in the images. Image mining is more than just an extension of data mining to image domain. It is an interdisciplinary endeavor that draws upon expertise in computer vision, image processing, image retrieval, data mining, machine learning, database, and artificial intelligence. Despite the development of many applications and algorithms in the individual research fields cited above, research in image mining is still in its infancy. In this paper, we will examine the research issues in image mining, current developments in image mining, particularly, image mining frameworks, state-of-the-art techniques and systems. We will also identify some future research directions for image mining at the end of this paper

Direct kernel biased discriminant analysis: a new content-based image retrieval relevance feedback algorithm

In recent years, a variety of relevance feedback (RF) schemes have been developed to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Given user feedback information, the key to a RF scheme is how to select a subset of image features to construct a suitable dissimilarity measure. Among various RF schemes, biased discriminant analysis (BDA) based RF is one of the most promising. It is based on the observation that all positive samples are alike, while in general each negative sample is negative in its own way. However, to use BDA, the small sample size (SSS) problem is a big challenge, as users tend to give a small number of feedback samples. To explore solutions to this issue, this paper proposes a direct kernel BDA (DKBDA), which is less sensitive to SSS. An incremental DKBDA (IDKBDA) is also developed to speed up the analysis. Experimental results are reported on a real-world image collection to demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the traditional kernel BDA (KBDA) and the support vector machine (SVM) based RF algorithms

The AXES submissions at TrecVid 2013

The AXES project participated in the interactive instance search task (INS), the semantic indexing task (SIN) the multimedia event recounting task (MER), and the multimedia event detection task (MED) for TRECVid 2013. Our interactive INS focused this year on using classifiers trained at query time with positive examples collected from external search engines. Participants in our INS experiments were carried out by students and researchers at Dublin City University. Our best INS runs performed on par with the top ranked INS runs in terms of P@10 and P@30, and around the median in terms of mAP. For SIN, MED and MER, we use systems based on state- of-the-art local low-level descriptors for motion, image, and sound, as well as high-level features to capture speech and text and the visual and audio stream respectively. The low-level descriptors were aggregated by means of Fisher vectors into high- dimensional video-level signatures, the high-level features are aggregated into bag-of-word histograms. Using these features we train linear classifiers, and use early and late-fusion to combine the different features. Our MED system achieved the best score of all submitted runs in the main track, as well as in the ad-hoc track. This paper describes in detail our INS, MER, and MED systems and the results and findings of our experimen