BoWFire: Detection of Fire in Still Images by Integrating Pixel Color and Texture Analysis

Emergency events involving fire are potentially harmful, demanding a fast and precise decision making. The use of crowdsourcing image and videos on crisis management systems can aid in these situations by providing more information than verbal/textual descriptions. Due to the usual high volume of data, automatic solutions need to discard non-relevant content without losing relevant information. There are several methods for fire detection on video using color-based models. However, they are not adequate for still image processing, because they can suffer on high false-positive results. These methods also suffer from parameters with little physical meaning, which makes fine tuning a difficult task. In this context, we propose a novel fire detection method for still images that uses classification based on color features combined with texture classification on superpixel regions. Our method uses a reduced number of parameters if compared to previous works, easing the process of fine tuning the method. Results show the effectiveness of our method of reducing false-positives while its precision remains compatible with the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the 28th SIBGRAPI Conference on Graphics, Patterns and Images, IEEE Pres

Multitraining support vector machine for image retrieval

Relevance feedback (RF) schemes based on support vector machines (SVMs) have been widely used in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). However, the performance of SVM-based RF approaches is often poor when the number of labeled feedback samples is small. This is mainly due to 1) the SVM classifier being unstable for small-size training sets because its optimal hyper plane is too sensitive to the training examples; and 2) the kernel method being ineffective because the feature dimension is much greater than the size of the training samples. In this paper, we develop a new machine learning technique, multitraining SVM (MTSVM), which combines the merits of the cotraining technique and a random sampling method in the feature space. Based on the proposed MTSVM algorithm, the above two problems can be mitigated. Experiments are carried out on a large image set of some 20 000 images, and the preliminary results demonstrate that the developed method consistently improves the performance over conventional SVM-based RFs in terms of precision and standard deviation, which are used to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of a RF algorithm, respectively

Novel color and local image descriptors for content-based image search

Content-based image classification, search and retrieval is a rapidly-expanding research area. With the advent of inexpensive digital cameras, cheap data storage, fast computing speeds and ever-increasing data transfer rates, millions of images are stored and shared over the Internet every day. This necessitates the development of systems that can classify these images into various categories without human intervention and on being presented a query image, can identify its contents in order to retrieve similar images. Towards that end, this dissertation focuses on investigating novel image descriptors based on texture, shape, color, and local information for advancing content-based image search. Specifically, first, a new color multi-mask Local Binary Patterns (mLBP) descriptor is presented to improve upon the traditional Local Binary Patterns (LBP) texture descriptor for better image classification performance. Second, the mLBP descriptors from different color spaces are fused to form the Color LBP Fusion (CLF) and Color Grayscale LBP Fusion (CGLF) descriptors that further improve image classification performance. Third, a new HaarHOG descriptor, which integrates the Haar wavelet transform and the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), is presented for extracting both shape and local information for image classification. Next, a novel three Dimensional Local Binary Patterns (3D-LBP) descriptor is proposed for color images by encoding both color and texture information for image search. Furthermore, the novel 3DLH and 3DLH-fusion descriptors are proposed, which combine the HaarHOG and the 3D-LBP descriptors by means of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and are able to improve upon the individual HaarHOG and 3D-LBP descriptors for image search. Subsequently, the innovative H-descriptor, and the H-fusion descriptor are presented that improve upon the 3DLH descriptor. Finally, the innovative Bag of Words-LBP (BoWL) descriptor is introduced that combines the idea of LBP with a bag-of-words representation to further improve image classification performance. To assess the feasibility of the proposed new image descriptors, two classification frameworks are used. In one, the PCA and the Enhanced Fisher Model (EFM) are applied for feature extraction and the nearest neighbor classification rule for classification. In the other, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used for classification. The classification performance is tested on several widely used and publicly available image datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed new image descriptors achieve an image classification performance better than or comparable to other popular image descriptors, such as the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), the Pyramid Histograms of visual Words (PHOW), the Pyramid Histograms of Oriented Gradients (PHOG), the Spatial Envelope (SE), the Color SIFT four Concentric Circles (C4CC), the Object Bank (OB), the Hierarchical Matching Pursuit (HMP), the Kernel Spatial Pyramid Matching (KSPM), the SIFT Sparse-coded Spatial Pyramid Matching (ScSPM), the Kernel Codebook (KC) and the LBP