Data-Driven Shape Analysis and Processing

Data-driven methods play an increasingly important role in discovering geometric, structural, and semantic relationships between 3D shapes in collections, and applying this analysis to support intelligent modeling, editing, and visualization of geometric data. In contrast to traditional approaches, a key feature of data-driven approaches is that they aggregate information from a collection of shapes to improve the analysis and processing of individual shapes. In addition, they are able to learn models that reason about properties and relationships of shapes without relying on hard-coded rules or explicitly programmed instructions. We provide an overview of the main concepts and components of these techniques, and discuss their application to shape classification, segmentation, matching, reconstruction, modeling and exploration, as well as scene analysis and synthesis, through reviewing the literature and relating the existing works with both qualitative and numerical comparisons. We conclude our report with ideas that can inspire future research in data-driven shape analysis and processing.Comment: 10 pages, 19 figure

Shape annotation for intelligent image retrieval

Annotation of shapes is an important process for semantic image retrieval. In this paper, we present a shape annotation framework that enables intelligent image retrieval by exploiting in a unified manner domain knowledge and perceptual description of shapes. A semi-supervised fuzzy clustering process is used to derive domain knowledge in terms of linguistic concepts referring to the semantic categories of shapes. For each category we derive a prototype that is a visual template for the category. A novel visual ontology is proposed to provide a description of prototypes and their salient parts. To describe parts of prototypes the visual ontology includes perceptual attributes that are defined by mimicking the analogy mechanism adopted by humans to describe the appearance of objects. The effectiveness of the developed framework as a facility for intelligent image retrieval is shown through results on a case study in the domain of fish shapes

An information-driven framework for image mining

[Abstract]: Image mining systems that can automatically extract semantically meaningful information (knowledge) from image data are increasingly in demand. The fundamental challenge in image mining is to determine how low-level, pixel representation contained in a raw image or image sequence can be processed to identify high-level spatial objects and relationships. To meet this challenge, we propose an efficient information-driven framework for image mining. We distinguish four levels of information: the Pixel Level, the Object Level, the Semantic Concept Level, and the Pattern and Knowledge Level. High-dimensional indexing schemes and retrieval techniques are also included in the framework to support the flow of information among the levels. We believe this framework represents the first step towards capturing the different levels of information present in image data and addressing the issues and challenges of discovering useful patterns/knowledge from each level

Adaptive constrained clustering with application to dynamic image database categorization and visualization.

The advent of larger storage spaces, affordable digital capturing devices, and an ever growing online community dedicated to sharing images has created a great need for efficient analysis methods. In fact, analyzing images for the purpose of automatic categorization and retrieval is quickly becoming an overwhelming task even for the casual user. Initially, systems designed for these applications relied on contextual information associated with images. However, it was realized that this approach does not scale to very large data sets and can be subjective. Then researchers proposed methods relying on the content of the images. This approach has also proved to be limited due to the semantic gap between the low-level representation of the image and the high-level user perception. In this dissertation, we introduce a novel clustering technique that is designed to combine multiple forms of information in order to overcome the disadvantages observed while using a single information domain. Our proposed approach, called Adaptive Constrained Clustering (ACC), is a robust, dynamic, and semi-supervised algorithm. It is based on minimizing a single objective function incorporating the abilities to: (i) use multiple feature subsets while learning cluster independent feature relevance weights; (ii) search for the optimal number of clusters; and (iii) incorporate partial supervision in the form of pairwise constraints. The content of the images is used to extract the features used in the clustering process. The context information is used in constructing a set of appropriate constraints. These constraints are used as partial supervision information to guide the clustering process. The ACC algorithm is dynamic in the sense that the number of categories are allowed to expand and contract depending on the distribution of the data and the available set of constraints. We show that the proposed ACC algorithm is able to partition a given data set into meaningful clusters using an adaptive, soft constraint satisfaction methodology for the purpose of automatically categorizing and summarizing an image database. We show that the ACC algorithm has the ability to incorporate various types of contextual information. This contextual information includes: spatial information provided by geo-referenced images that include GPS coordinates pinpointing their location, temporal information provided by each image\u27s time stamp indicating the capture time, and textual information provided by a set of keywords describing the semantics of the associated images