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

Computational intelligence for industrial and environmental applications

Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques are being increasingly used for automatic monitoring and control systems, especially regarding industrial and environmental applications, due to their performance, their capabilities in fusing noisy or incomplete data obtained from heterogeneous sensors, and the ability in adapting to variations in the operational conditions. Moreover, the increase in the computational power and the decrease of the size of the computing architectures allowed a more pervasive use of CI techniques in a great variety of situations. In this paper, we propose a brief review of the most important CI techniques applied in each step of the design of a monitoring and control system for industrial and environmental applications, and describe how these techniques are integrated in the development of efficient industrial and environmental applications