Salient Regions for Query by Image Content

Much previous work on image retrieval has used global features such as colour and texture to describe the content of the image. However, these global features are insufficient to accurately describe the image content when different parts of the image have different characteristics. This paper discusses how this problem can be circumvented by using salient interest points and compares and contrasts an extension to previous work in which the concept of scale is incorporated into the selection of salient regions to select the areas of the image that are most interesting and generate local descriptors to describe the image characteristics in that region. The paper describes and contrasts two such salient region descriptors and compares them through their repeatability rate under a range of common image transforms. Finally, the paper goes on to investigate the performance of one of the salient region detectors in an image retrieval situation

Edge-Directed Invariant Shoeprint Image Retrieval

In this paper, we propose the use of image feature points for the classification of shoeprint images in a forensic setting. These feature points are quantified using wavelet maxima points extracted from a nonorthogonal wavelet decomposition of the shoeprint images. Wavelet transforms have been shown to be an effective analysis tool for image indexing, retrieval and characterization. This effectiveness is mainly attributed to the ability of the latter transforms to capture well the spatial information and visual features of the analyzed images using only few dominant subband coefficients. In this work, we propose the use of a nonorthogonal multiresolution representation to achieve shift-invariance. To reduce the content redundancy, we limit the feature space to wavelet maxima points. Such dimensionality reduction enables compact image representation while satisfying the requirements of the "information-preserving" rule. Based on the wavelet maxima representations, we suggest the use of a variance-weighted minimum distance measure as the similarity metric for image query, retrieval, and search purposes. As a result, each image is indexed by a vector in the wavelet maxima moment space. Finally, performance results are reported to illustrate the robustness of the extracted features in searching and retrieving of shoeprint images independently of position, size, orientation and image background

Trademark image retrieval by local features

The challenge of abstract trademark image retrieval as a test of machine vision algorithms has attracted considerable research interest in the past decade. Current operational trademark retrieval systems involve manual annotation of the images (the current ‘gold standard’). Accordingly, current systems require a substantial amount of time and labour to access, and are therefore expensive to operate. This thesis focuses on the development of algorithms that mimic aspects of human visual perception in order to retrieve similar abstract trademark images automatically. A significant category of trademark images are typically highly stylised, comprising a collection of distinctive graphical elements that often include geometric shapes. Therefore, in order to compare the similarity of such images the principal aim of this research has been to develop a method for solving the partial matching and shape perception problem. There are few useful techniques for partial shape matching in the context of trademark retrieval, because those existing techniques tend not to support multicomponent retrieval. When this work was initiated most trademark image retrieval systems represented images by means of global features, which are not suited to solving the partial matching problem. Instead, the author has investigated the use of local image features as a means to finding similarities between trademark images that only partially match in terms of their subcomponents. During the course of this work, it has been established that the Harris and Chabat detectors could potentially perform sufficiently well to serve as the basis for local feature extraction in trademark image retrieval. Early findings in this investigation indicated that the well established SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) local features, based on the Harris detector, could potentially serve as an adequate underlying local representation for matching trademark images. There are few researchers who have used mechanisms based on human perception for trademark image retrieval, implying that the shape representations utilised in the past to solve this problem do not necessarily reflect the shapes contained in these image, as characterised by human perception. In response, a ii practical approach to trademark image retrieval by perceptual grouping has been developed based on defining meta-features that are calculated from the spatial configurations of SIFT local image features. This new technique measures certain visual properties of the appearance of images containing multiple graphical elements and supports perceptual grouping by exploiting the non-accidental properties of their configuration. Our validation experiments indicated that we were indeed able to capture and quantify the differences in the global arrangement of sub-components evident when comparing stylised images in terms of their visual appearance properties. Such visual appearance properties, measured using 17 of the proposed metafeatures, include relative sub-component proximity, similarity, rotation and symmetry. Similar work on meta-features, based on the above Gestalt proximity, similarity, and simplicity groupings of local features, had not been reported in the current computer vision literature at the time of undertaking this work. We decided to adopted relevance feedback to allow the visual appearance properties of relevant and non-relevant images returned in response to a query to be determined by example. Since limited training data is available when constructing a relevance classifier by means of user supplied relevance feedback, the intrinsically non-parametric machine learning algorithm ID3 (Iterative Dichotomiser 3) was selected to construct decision trees by means of dynamic rule induction. We believe that the above approach to capturing high-level visual concepts, encoded by means of meta-features specified by example through relevance feedback and decision tree classification, to support flexible trademark image retrieval and to be wholly novel. The retrieval performance the above system was compared with two other state-of-the-art image trademark retrieval systems: Artisan developed by Eakins (Eakins et al., 1998) and a system developed by Jiang (Jiang et al., 2006). Using relevance feedback, our system achieves higher average normalised precision than either of the systems developed by Eakins’ or Jiang. However, while our trademark image query and database set is based on an image dataset used by Eakins, we employed different numbers of images. It was not possible to access to the same query set and image database used in the evaluation of Jiang’s trademark iii image retrieval system evaluation. Despite these differences in evaluation methodology, our approach would appear to have the potential to improve retrieval effectiveness

A Review of Wavelet Based Fingerprint Image Retrieval

A digital image is composed of pixels and information about brightness of image and RGB triples are used to encode color information. Image retrieval problem encountered when searching and retrieving images that is relevant to a user’s request from a database. In Content based image retrieval, input goes in the form of an image. In these images, different features are extracted and then the other images from database are retrieved accordingly. Biometric distinguishes the people by their physical or behavioral qualities. Fingerprints are viewed as a standout amongst the most solid for human distinguishment because of their uniqueness and ingenuity. To retrieve fingerprint images on the basis of their textural features,by using different wavelets. From the input fingerprint image, first of all center point area is selected and then its textural features are extracted and stored in database. When a query image comes then again its center point is selected and then its texture feature are extracted. Then these features are matched for similarity and then resultant image is displayed. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15026

Shape-based invariant features extraction for object recognition

International audienceThe emergence of new technologies enables generating large quantity of digital information including images; this leads to an increasing number of generated digital images. Therefore it appears a necessity for automatic systems for image retrieval. These systems consist of techniques used for query specification and re-trieval of images from an image collection. The most frequent and the most com-mon means for image retrieval is the indexing using textual keywords. But for some special application domains and face to the huge quantity of images, key-words are no more sufficient or unpractical. Moreover, images are rich in content; so in order to overcome these mentioned difficulties, some approaches are pro-posed based on visual features derived directly from the content of the image: these are the content-based image retrieval (CBIR) approaches. They allow users to search the desired image by specifying image queries: a query can be an exam-ple, a sketch or visual features (e.g., colour, texture and shape). Once the features have been defined and extracted, the retrieval becomes a task of measuring simi-larity between image features. An important property of these features is to be in-variant under various deformations that the observed image could undergo. In this chapter, we will present a number of existing methods for CBIR applica-tions. We will also describe some measures that are usually used for similarity measurement. At the end, and as an application example, we present a specific ap-proach, that we are developing, to illustrate the topic by providing experimental results

Automatic classification of flying bird species using computer vision techniques [forthcoming]

Bird populations are identified as important biodiversity indicators, so collecting reliable population data is important to ecologists and scientists. However, existing manual monitoring methods are labour-intensive, time-consuming, and potentially error prone. The aim of our work is to develop a reliable automated system, capable of classifying the species of individual birds, during flight, using video data. This is challenging, but appropriate for use in the field, since there is often a requirement to identify in flight, rather than while stationary. We present our work, which uses a new and rich set of appearance features for classification from video. We also introduce motion features including curvature and wing beat frequency. Combined with Normal Bayes classifier and a Support Vector Machine classifier, we present experimental evaluations of our appearance and motion features across a data set comprising 7 species. Using our appearance feature set alone we achieved a classification rate of 92% and 89% (using Normal Bayes and SVM classifiers respectively) which significantly outperforms a recent comparable state-of-the-art system. Using motion features alone we achieved a lower-classification rate, but motivate our on-going work which we seeks to combine these appearance and motion feature to achieve even more robust classification

Content-Based Image Retrieval using SURF and Colour Moments

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a challenging task which retrieves the similar images from the large database. Most of the CBIR system uses the low-level features such as colour, texture and shape to extract the features from the images. In Recent years the Interest points are used to extract the most similar images with different view point and different transformations. In this paper the SURF is combined with the colour feature to improve the retrieval accuracy. SURF is fast and robust interest points detector/descriptor which is used in many computer vision applications. To improve the performance of the system the SURF is combined with Colour Moments since SURF works only on gray scale images. The KD-tree with the Best Bin First (BBF) search algorithm is to index and match the similarity etween the features of the images. Finally, Voting Scheme algorithm is used to rank and retrieve the matched images from the database