43,501 research outputs found
Image annotation and retrieval based on multi-modal feature clustering and similarity propagation.
The performance of content-based image retrieval systems has proved to be inherently constrained by the used low level features, and cannot give satisfactory results when the user\u27s high level concepts cannot be expressed by low level features. In an attempt to bridge this semantic gap, recent approaches started integrating both low level-visual features and high-level textual keywords. Unfortunately, manual image annotation is a tedious process and may not be possible for large image databases. In this thesis we propose a system for image retrieval that has three mains components. The first component of our system consists of a novel possibilistic clustering and feature weighting algorithm based on robust modeling of the Generalized Dirichlet (GD) finite mixture. Robust estimation of the mixture model parameters is achieved by incorporating two complementary types of membership degrees. The first one is a posterior probability that indicates the degree to which a point fits the estimated distribution. The second membership represents the degree of typicality and is used to indentify and discard noise points. Robustness to noisy and irrelevant features is achieved by transforming the data to make the features independent and follow Beta distribution, and learning optimal relevance weight for each feature subset within each cluster. We extend our algorithm to find the optimal number of clusters in an unsupervised and efficient way by exploiting some properties of the possibilistic membership function. We also outline a semi-supervised version of the proposed algorithm. In the second component of our system consists of a novel approach to unsupervised image annotation. Our approach is based on: (i) the proposed semi-supervised possibilistic clustering; (ii) a greedy selection and joining algorithm (GSJ); (iii) Bayes rule; and (iv) a probabilistic model that is based on possibilistic memebership degrees to annotate an image. The third component of the proposed system consists of an image retrieval framework based on multi-modal similarity propagation. The proposed framework is designed to deal with two data modalities: low-level visual features and high-level textual keywords generated by our proposed image annotation algorithm. The multi-modal similarity propagation system exploits the mutual reinforcement of relational data and results in a nonlinear combination of the different modalities. Specifically, it is used to learn the semantic similarities between images by leveraging the relationships between features from the different modalities. The proposed image annotation and retrieval approaches are implemented and tested with a standard benchmark dataset. We show the effectiveness of our clustering algorithm to handle high dimensional and noisy data. We compare our proposed image annotation approach to three state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image retrieval system
The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video
In this paper, we introduce a simple and standalone manual annotation tool
for images, audio and video: the VGG Image Annotator (VIA). This is a light
weight, standalone and offline software package that does not require any
installation or setup and runs solely in a web browser. The VIA software allows
human annotators to define and describe spatial regions in images or video
frames, and temporal segments in audio or video. These manual annotations can
be exported to plain text data formats such as JSON and CSV and therefore are
amenable to further processing by other software tools. VIA also supports
collaborative annotation of a large dataset by a group of human annotators. The
BSD open source license of this software allows it to be used in any academic
project or commercial application.Comment: to appear in Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on
Multimedia (MM '19), October 21-25, 2019, Nice, France. ACM, New York, NY,
USA, 4 page
A study into annotation ranking metrics in geo-tagged image corpora
Community contributed datasets are becoming increasingly common in automated image annotation systems. One important issue with community image data is that there is no guarantee that the associated metadata is relevant. A method is required that can accurately rank the semantic relevance of community annotations. This should enable the extracting of relevant subsets from potentially noisy collections of these annotations. Having relevant, non heterogeneous tags assigned to images should improve community image retrieval systems, such as Flickr, which are based on text retrieval methods. In the literature, the current state of the art approach to ranking the semantic relevance of Flickr tags is based on the widely used tf-idf metric. In the case of datasets containing landmark images, however, this metric is inefficient due to the high frequency of common landmark tags within the data set and can be improved upon. In this paper, we present a landmark recognition framework, that provides end-to-end automated recognition and annotation. In our study into automated annotation, we evaluate 5 alternate approaches to tf-idf
to rank tag relevance in community contributed landmark image corpora. We carry out a thorough evaluation of each of these ranking metrics and results of this evaluation demonstrate that four of these proposed techniques outperform the current commonly-used tf-idf approach for this task
Weakly supervised segment annotation via expectation kernel density estimation
Since the labelling for the positive images/videos is ambiguous in weakly
supervised segment annotation, negative mining based methods that only use the
intra-class information emerge. In these methods, negative instances are
utilized to penalize unknown instances to rank their likelihood of being an
object, which can be considered as a voting in terms of similarity. However,
these methods 1) ignore the information contained in positive bags, 2) only
rank the likelihood but cannot generate an explicit decision function. In this
paper, we propose a voting scheme involving not only the definite negative
instances but also the ambiguous positive instances to make use of the extra
useful information in the weakly labelled positive bags. In the scheme, each
instance votes for its label with a magnitude arising from the similarity, and
the ambiguous positive instances are assigned soft labels that are iteratively
updated during the voting. It overcomes the limitations of voting using only
the negative bags. We also propose an expectation kernel density estimation
(eKDE) algorithm to gain further insight into the voting mechanism.
Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme beyond the
baselines.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure
Optical tomography: Image improvement using mixed projection of parallel and fan beam modes
Mixed parallel and fan beam projection is a technique used to increase the quality images. This research focuses on enhancing the image quality in optical tomography. Image quality can be defined by measuring the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) parameters. The findings of this research prove that by combining parallel and fan beam projection, the image quality can be increased by more than 10%in terms of its PSNR value and more than 100% in terms of its NMSE value compared to a single parallel beam
Automatic annotation for weakly supervised learning of detectors
PhDObject detection in images and action detection in videos are among the most widely studied
computer vision problems, with applications in consumer photography, surveillance, and automatic
media tagging. Typically, these standard detectors are fully supervised, that is they require
a large body of training data where the locations of the objects/actions in images/videos have
been manually annotated. With the emergence of digital media, and the rise of high-speed internet,
raw images and video are available for little to no cost. However, the manual annotation
of object and action locations remains tedious, slow, and expensive. As a result there has been
a great interest in training detectors with weak supervision where only the presence or absence
of object/action in image/video is needed, not the location. This thesis presents approaches for
weakly supervised learning of object/action detectors with a focus on automatically annotating
object and action locations in images/videos using only binary weak labels indicating the presence
or absence of object/action in images/videos.
First, a framework for weakly supervised learning of object detectors in images is presented.
In the proposed approach, a variation of multiple instance learning (MIL) technique for automatically
annotating object locations in weakly labelled data is presented which, unlike existing
approaches, uses inter-class and intra-class cue fusion to obtain the initial annotation. The initial
annotation is then used to start an iterative process in which standard object detectors are used to
refine the location annotation. Finally, to ensure that the iterative training of detectors do not drift
from the object of interest, a scheme for detecting model drift is also presented. Furthermore,
unlike most other methods, our weakly supervised approach is evaluated on data without manual
pose (object orientation) annotation.
Second, an analysis of the initial annotation of objects, using inter-class and intra-class cues,
is carried out. From the analysis, a new method based on negative mining (NegMine) is presented
for the initial annotation of both object and action data. The NegMine based approach is a
much simpler formulation using only inter-class measure and requires no complex combinatorial
optimisation but can still meet or outperform existing approaches including the previously pre3
sented inter-intra class cue fusion approach. Furthermore, NegMine can be fused with existing
approaches to boost their performance.
Finally, the thesis will take a step back and look at the use of generic object detectors as prior
knowledge in weakly supervised learning of object detectors. These generic object detectors are
typically based on sampling saliency maps that indicate if a pixel belongs to the background
or foreground. A new approach to generating saliency maps is presented that, unlike existing
approaches, looks beyond the current image of interest and into images similar to the current
image. We show that our generic object proposal method can be used by itself to annotate the
weakly labelled object data with surprisingly high accuracy
Adaptive Tag Selection for Image Annotation
Not all tags are relevant to an image, and the number of relevant tags is
image-dependent. Although many methods have been proposed for image
auto-annotation, the question of how to determine the number of tags to be
selected per image remains open. The main challenge is that for a large tag
vocabulary, there is often a lack of ground truth data for acquiring optimal
cutoff thresholds per tag. In contrast to previous works that pre-specify the
number of tags to be selected, we propose in this paper adaptive tag selection.
The key insight is to divide the vocabulary into two disjoint subsets, namely a
seen set consisting of tags having ground truth available for optimizing their
thresholds and a novel set consisting of tags without any ground truth. Such a
division allows us to estimate how many tags shall be selected from the novel
set according to the tags that have been selected from the seen set. The
effectiveness of the proposed method is justified by our participation in the
ImageCLEF 2014 image annotation task. On a set of 2,065 test images with ground
truth available for 207 tags, the benchmark evaluation shows that compared to
the popular top- strategy which obtains an F-score of 0.122, adaptive tag
selection achieves a higher F-score of 0.223. Moreover, by treating the
underlying image annotation system as a black box, the new method can be used
as an easy plug-in to boost the performance of existing systems
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