Enhanced image annotations based on spatial information extraction and ontologies

Current research on image annotation often represents images in terms of labelled regions or objects, but pays little attention to the spatial positions or relationships between those regions or objects. To be effective, general purpose image retrieval systems require images with comprehensive annotations describing fully the content of the image. Much research is being done on automatic image annotation schemes but few authors address the issue of spatial annotations directly. This paper begins with a brief analysis of real picture queries to librarians showing how spatial terms are used to formulate queries. The paper is then concerned with the development of an enhanced automatic image annotation system, which extracts spatial information about objects in the image. The approach uses region boundaries and region labels to generate annotations describing absolute object positions and also relative positions between pairs of objects. A domain ontology and spatial information ontology are also used to extract more complex information about the relative closeness of objects to the viewer

Indexing and retrieval of images by spatial constraints

www.elsevier.com/locate/yjvci Many multimedia applications require retrieval of spatially similar images against a given query image. Existing work on image retrieval and indexing either requires extensive low-level computations or elaborate human interaction. In this paper, we introduce a new symbolic image representation technique to eliminate repetitive tasks of image understanding and object processing. Our symbolic image representation scheme is based on the concept of hierarchical decomposition of image space into spatial arrangements of features while preserving the spatial relationships among the image objects. Quadtrees are used to manage the decomposition hierarchy and play an important role in defining the similarity measure. This scheme is incremental in nature, can be adopted to accommodate varying levels of details in a wide range of application domains, and provides geometric variance independence. While ensuring that there are no false negatives, our approach also discriminates against non-matching entities by eliminating them as soon as possible, during the coarser matching phases. A hierarchical indexing scheme based on the concept of image signatures and efficient quadtree matching has been devised. Each level of the hierarchy tends to reduce the search space, allowing mor