Perceptual-based textures for scene labeling: a bottom-up and a top-down approach

Due to the semantic gap, the automatic interpretation of digital images is a very challenging task. Both the segmentation and classification are intricate because of the high variation of the data. Therefore, the application of appropriate features is of utter importance. This paper presents biologically inspired texture features for material classification and interpreting outdoor scenery images. Experiments show that the presented texture features obtain the best classification results for material recognition compared to other well-known texture features, with an average classification rate of 93.0%. For scene analysis, both a bottom-up and top-down strategy are employed to bridge the semantic gap. At first, images are segmented into regions based on the perceptual texture and next, a semantic label is calculated for these regions. Since this emerging interpretation is still error prone, domain knowledge is ingested to achieve a more accurate description of the depicted scene. By applying both strategies, 91.9% of the pixels from outdoor scenery images obtained a correct label

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

From media crossing to media mining

This paper reviews how the concept of Media Crossing has contributed to the advancement of the application domain of information access and explores directions for a future research agenda. These will include themes that could help to broaden the scope and to incorporate the concept of medium-crossing in a more general approach that not only uses combinations of medium-specific processing, but that also exploits more abstract medium-independent representations, partly based on the foundational work on statistical language models for information retrieval. Three examples of successful applications of media crossing will be presented, with a focus on the aspects that could be considered a first step towards a generalized form of media mining

Fuzzy-based Propagation of Prior Knowledge to Improve Large-Scale Image Analysis Pipelines

Many automatically analyzable scientific questions are well-posed and offer a variety of information about the expected outcome a priori. Although often being neglected, this prior knowledge can be systematically exploited to make automated analysis operations sensitive to a desired phenomenon or to evaluate extracted content with respect to this prior knowledge. For instance, the performance of processing operators can be greatly enhanced by a more focused detection strategy and the direct information about the ambiguity inherent in the extracted data. We present a new concept for the estimation and propagation of uncertainty involved in image analysis operators. This allows using simple processing operators that are suitable for analyzing large-scale 3D+t microscopy images without compromising the result quality. On the foundation of fuzzy set theory, we transform available prior knowledge into a mathematical representation and extensively use it enhance the result quality of various processing operators. All presented concepts are illustrated on a typical bioimage analysis pipeline comprised of seed point detection, segmentation, multiview fusion and tracking. Furthermore, the functionality of the proposed approach is validated on a comprehensive simulated 3D+t benchmark data set that mimics embryonic development and on large-scale light-sheet microscopy data of a zebrafish embryo. The general concept introduced in this contribution represents a new approach to efficiently exploit prior knowledge to improve the result quality of image analysis pipelines. Especially, the automated analysis of terabyte-scale microscopy data will benefit from sophisticated and efficient algorithms that enable a quantitative and fast readout. The generality of the concept, however, makes it also applicable to practically any other field with processing strategies that are arranged as linear pipelines.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figure