Content-based indexing of low resolution documents

In any multimedia presentation, the trend for attendees taking pictures of slides that interest them during the presentation using capturing devices is gaining popularity. To enhance the image usefulness, the images captured could be linked to image or video database. The database can be used for the purpose of file archiving, teaching and learning, research and knowledge management, which concern image search. However, the above-mentioned devices include cameras or mobiles phones have low resolution resulted from poor lighting and noise. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is considered among the most interesting and promising fields as far as image search is concerned. Image search is related with finding images that are similar for the known query image found in a given image database. This thesis concerns with the methods used for the purpose of identifying documents that are captured using image capturing devices. In addition, the thesis also concerns with a technique that can be used to retrieve images from an indexed image database. Both concerns above apply digital image processing technique. To build an indexed structure for fast and high quality content-based retrieval of an image, some existing representative signatures and the key indexes used have been revised. The retrieval performance is very much relying on how the indexing is done. The retrieval approaches that are currently in existence including making use of shape, colour and texture features. Putting into consideration these features relative to individual databases, the majority of retrievals approaches have poor results on low resolution documents, consuming a lot of time and in the some cases, for the given query image, irrelevant images are obtained. The proposed identification and indexing method in the thesis uses a Visual Signature (VS). VS consists of the captures slides textual layout’s graphical information, shape’s moment and spatial distribution of colour. This approach, which is signature-based are considered for fast and efficient matching to fulfil the needs of real-time applications. The approach also has the capability to overcome the problem low resolution document such as noisy image, the environment’s varying lighting conditions and complex backgrounds. We present hierarchy indexing techniques, whose foundation are tree and clustering. K-means clustering are used for visual features like colour since their spatial distribution give a good image’s global information. Tree indexing for extracted layout and shape features are structured hierarchically and Euclidean distance is used to get similarity image for CBIR. The assessment of the proposed indexing scheme is conducted based on recall and precision, a standard CBIR retrieval performance evaluation. We develop CBIR system and conduct various retrieval experiments with the fundamental aim of comparing the accuracy during image retrieval. A new algorithm that can be used with integrated visual signatures, especially in late fusion query was introduced. The algorithm has the capability of reducing any shortcoming associated with normalisation in initial fusion technique. Slides from conferences, lectures and meetings presentation are used for comparing the proposed technique’s performances with that of the existing approaches with the help of real data. This finding of the thesis presents exciting possibilities as the CBIR systems is able to produce high quality result even for a query, which uses low resolution documents. In the future, the utilization of multimodal signatures, relevance feedback and artificial intelligence technique are recommended to be used in CBIR system to further enhance the performance

Adaptive Relevance Feedback for Large-scale Image Retrieval

Our research addresses the need for an efficient, effective, and interactive access to large-scale image collections. Image retrieval needs are evolving beyond the capabilities of the traditional indexing based on manual annotation, and the most desirable characteristic of any image retrieval system is to be able to deal with automatically-extracted visual indexing features, while providing an intuitive and simple interaction with users. In this thesis, we investigate an innovative query-free retrieval approach that was proposed by Ferecatu and Geman. Starting from an heuristic sampling of the collection, this approach does not require any explicit query, neither keywords nor image-examples. It relies solely on an iterative relevance feedback mechanism driven by the user's subjective judgments of image similarities. At each iteration, the system displays a small set of images and the user is asked to choose the image that best matches in her opinion what she is searching for. The system updates an internal state based on automatically-extracted indexing features, and it displays a new set of images accordingly. The idea is that the system converges towards what the user is searching for, and iteratively it displays more and more relevant images. Our contributions are related to four complementary aspects of the iterative relevance feedback mechanism. First, we formalize a large-scale approach based on a hierarchical tree-like organization of the images computed off-line. Second, we propose a versatile modulation of the exploration/exploitation trade-off based on the consistency of the system internal states between successive iterations. Third, we elaborate a long-term optimization of the similarity metric based on the user searching session logs accumulated off-line. Forth, we propose a dynamic short-term adaptation of the similarity metric based on the relevance feedback events accumulated on-the-fly at each iteration. Furthermore, we round up our research by integrating all our contributions together into one comprehensive retrieval system. Experimental validation was carried out by implementing a web-application which includes all our contributions. This software is distributed to the public under the AGPL Version 3 open-source license. We carried out plenty of user-based evaluation campaigns, and we analyzed systematically all our contributions. We show empirically that each of them improves significantly the retrieval performance of the original framework. Moreover, we show that they are complementary to each other, and their overall integration is consistently beneficial. We foresee that our contributions, along with our open-source web-application, will motivate further investigations and facilitate further experiments. We hope that our research brings the iterative relevance feedback mechanism one step closer to commercial applications

A Comprehensive Review on the Relevance Feedback in Visual Information Retrieval

Abstract-Visual information retrieval in images and video has been developing rapidly in our daily life and is an important research field in content-based information indexing and retrieval, automatic annotation and structuring of images. Visual information system can make the use of relevance feedback so that the user progressively refines the search result by marking images in the result as relevant , not relevant or neutral to the search query and then repeating the search with the new information. With a comprehensive review as the main portion, this paper also suggested some novel solutions and perspectives throughout the discussion. Introduce the concept of Negative bootstrap, opens up interesting avenues for future research. Keywords-Bootstrapping, CBIR (Content Based Image Retrieval), Relevance feedback VIR (Visual Information Retrieval). I. INTRODUCTION There has been a renewed spurt of research activity in Visual Information Retrieval. Basically two kinds of information are associated with a visual object (image or video): information about the object, called its metadata, and information contained within the object, called visual features. Metadata is alphanumeric and generally expressible as a schema of a relational or object-oriented database. Visual features are derived through computational processes typically image processing, computer vision, and computational geometric routines executed on the visual object. The simplest visual features that can be computed are based on pixel values of raw data, and several early image database systems [1] used pixels as the basis of their data models. In many specific applications, the process of visual feature extraction is limited by the availability of fast, implementable techniques in image processing and computer vision II. RELATED WORK Initially developed in document retrieval (Salton 1989), relevance feedback was transformed and introduced into content-based multimedia retrieval, mainly content-based image retrieval CBIR)[3]

Discriminative learning with application to interactive facial image retrieval

The amount of digital images is growing drastically and advanced tools for searching in large image collections are therefore becoming urgently needed. Content-based image retrieval is advantageous for such a task in terms of automatic feature extraction and indexing without human labor and subjectivity in image annotations. The semantic gap between high-level semantics and low-level visual features can be reduced by the relevance feedback technique. However, most existing interactive content-based image retrieval (ICBIR) systems require a substantial amount of human evaluation labor, which leads to the evaluation fatigue problem that heavily restricts the application of ICBIR. In this thesis a solution based on discriminative learning is presented. It extends an existing ICBIR system, PicSOM, towards practical applications. The enhanced ICBIR system allows users to input partial relevance which includes not only relevance extent but also relevance reason. A multi-phase retrieval with partial relevance can adapt to the user's searching intention in a from-coarse-to-fine manner. The retrieval performance can be improved by employing supervised learning as a preprocessing step before unsupervised content-based indexing. In this work, Parzen Discriminant Analysis (PDA) is proposed to extract discriminative components from images. PDA regularizes the Informative Discriminant Analysis (IDA) objective with a greatly accelerated optimization algorithm. Moreover, discriminative Self-Organizing Maps trained with resulting features can easily handle fuzzy categorizations. The proposed techniques have been applied to interactive facial image retrieval. Both a query example and a benchmark simulation study are presented, which indicate that the first image depicting the target subject can be retrieved in a small number of rounds

Content-based Image Retrieval using Color and Geometry

The increased need of content based image retrieval technique can be found in a number of different domains such as Data Mining, Education, Medical Imaging, Crime Prevention, Weather forecasting, Remote Sensing and Management of Earth Resources. With the development of Multimedia data types and heavy increase in available bandwidth, there’s a huge demand of Image Retrieval system Content based image retrieval system uses color and geometry means to store, retrieve, sort and print any combinations of the images. The retrieval of images is, for the majority of search engines, available for collecting data from the image, this can be an image file name, html tags and surrounding text. This left the actual image more or less ignored. CBIR uses methods that analyze the actual bits and pieces i.e. color, shape, texture and spatial layout. There have been different approaches such as feature extraction, indexing and retrieval process. One approach is to make an attempt to classify the image into a more textual described context. With the image classified, it can be retrieved using more traditional and better retrieval methods. Our system Content Based Image Retrieval which is based on color and geometry, the system exactly does feature extraction in first step by using color, texture and shape (geometry) on images which gives there features which can be used to classify the image into different groups using distance formulas. Also the system gives relevant images as well as irrelevant images. The project thus going to work on relevance feedback of user which helps to improve the overall results

Image retrieval : a first step for a human centered approach

International audienceImage indexing using content analysis is known as a difficult task, involving the vision research domain. Using these tools in the context of a retrieval system is generally frustrating for users, due to a lack of interfaces development, and to the difficulty for users to understand the low-level features managed by the system. We propose in this paper a general point of view for introducing a link between such systems and potential users. This includes image features based on visual perception models, a relevance feedback model, and a graphical interface to express the information need through user-system interaction

Interactive retrieval of video using pre-computed shot-shot similarities

A probabilistic framework for content-based interactive video retrieval is described. The developed indexing of video fragments originates from the probability of the user's positive judgment about key-frames of video shots. Initial estimates of the probabilities are obtained from low-level feature representation. Only statistically significant estimates are picked out, the rest are replaced by an appropriate constant allowing efficient access at search time without loss of search quality and leading to improvement in most experiments. With time, these probability estimates are updated from the relevance judgment of users performing searches, resulting in further substantial increases in mean average precision

The relationship between IR and multimedia databases

Modern extensible database systems support multimedia data through ADTs. However, because of the problems with multimedia query formulation, this support is not sufficient.\ud \ud Multimedia querying requires an iterative search process involving many different representations of the objects in the database. The support that is needed is very similar to the processes in information retrieval.\ud \ud Based on this observation, we develop the miRRor architecture for multimedia query processing. We design a layered framework based on information retrieval techniques, to provide a usable query interface to the multimedia database.\ud \ud First, we introduce a concept layer to enable reasoning over low-level concepts in the database.\ud \ud Second, we add an evidential reasoning layer as an intermediate between the user and the concept layer.\ud \ud Third, we add the functionality to process the users' relevance feedback.\ud \ud We then adapt the inference network model from text retrieval to an evidential reasoning model for multimedia query processing.\ud \ud We conclude with an outline for implementation of miRRor on top of the Monet extensible database system