Investigation of new feature descriptors for image search and classification

Content-based image search, classification and retrieval is an active and important research area due to its broad applications as well as the complexity of the problem. Understanding the semantics and contents of images for recognition remains one of the most difficult and prevailing problems in the machine intelligence and computer vision community. With large variations in size, pose, illumination and occlusions, image classification is a very challenging task. A good classification framework should address the key issues of discriminatory feature extraction as well as efficient and accurate classification. Towards that end, this dissertation focuses on exploring new image descriptors by incorporating cues from the human visual system, and integrating local, texture, shape as well as color information to construct robust and effective feature representations for advancing content-based image search and classification. Based on the Gabor wavelet transformation, whose kernels are similar to the 2D receptive field profiles of the mammalian cortical simple cells, a series of new image descriptors is developed. Specifically, first, a new color Gabor-HOG (GHOG) descriptor is introduced by concatenating the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) of the component images produced by applying Gabor filters in multiple scales and orientations to encode shape information. Second, the GHOG descriptor is analyzed in six different color spaces and grayscale to propose different color GHOG descriptors, which are further combined to present a new Fused Color GHOG (FC-GHOG) descriptor. Third, a novel GaborPHOG (GPHOG) descriptor is proposed which improves upon the Pyramid Histograms of Oriented Gradients (PHOG) descriptor, and subsequently a new FC-GPHOG descriptor is constructed by combining the multiple color GPHOG descriptors and employing the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Next, the Gabor-LBP (GLBP) is derived by accumulating the Local Binary Patterns (LBP) histograms of the local Gabor filtered images to encode texture and local information of an image. Furthermore, a novel Gabor-LBPPHOG (GLP) image descriptor is proposed which integrates the GLBP and the GPHOG descriptors as a feature set and an innovative Fused Color Gabor-LBP-PHOG (FC-GLP) is constructed by fusing the GLP from multiple color spaces. Subsequently, The GLBP and the GHOG descriptors are then combined to produce the Gabor-LBP-HOG (GLH) feature vector which performs well on different object and scene image categories. The six color GLH vectors are further concatenated to form the Fused Color GLH (FC-GLH) descriptor. Finally, the Wigner based Local Binary Patterns (WLBP) descriptor is proposed that combines multi-neighborhood LBP, Pseudo-Wigner distribution of images and the popular bag of words model to effectively classify scene images. To assess the feasibility of the proposed new image descriptors, two classification methods are used: one method applies the PCA and the Enhanced Fisher Model (EFM) for feature extraction and the nearest neighbor rule for classification, while the other method employs the Support Vector Machine (SVM). The classification performance of the proposed descriptors is tested on several publicly available popular image datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed new image descriptors achieve image search and classification results better than or at par with other popular image descriptors, such as the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), the Pyramid Histograms of visual Words (PHOW), the Pyramid Histograms of Oriented Gradients (PHOG), the Spatial Envelope (SE), the Color SIFT four Concentric Circles (C4CC), the Object Bank (OB), the Context Aware Topic Model (CA-TM), the Hierarchical Matching Pursuit (HMP), the Kernel Spatial Pyramid Matching (KSPM), the SIFT Sparse-coded Spatial Pyramid Matching (Sc-SPM), the Kernel Codebook (KC) and the LBP

Novel color and local image descriptors for content-based image search

Content-based image classification, search and retrieval is a rapidly-expanding research area. With the advent of inexpensive digital cameras, cheap data storage, fast computing speeds and ever-increasing data transfer rates, millions of images are stored and shared over the Internet every day. This necessitates the development of systems that can classify these images into various categories without human intervention and on being presented a query image, can identify its contents in order to retrieve similar images. Towards that end, this dissertation focuses on investigating novel image descriptors based on texture, shape, color, and local information for advancing content-based image search. Specifically, first, a new color multi-mask Local Binary Patterns (mLBP) descriptor is presented to improve upon the traditional Local Binary Patterns (LBP) texture descriptor for better image classification performance. Second, the mLBP descriptors from different color spaces are fused to form the Color LBP Fusion (CLF) and Color Grayscale LBP Fusion (CGLF) descriptors that further improve image classification performance. Third, a new HaarHOG descriptor, which integrates the Haar wavelet transform and the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), is presented for extracting both shape and local information for image classification. Next, a novel three Dimensional Local Binary Patterns (3D-LBP) descriptor is proposed for color images by encoding both color and texture information for image search. Furthermore, the novel 3DLH and 3DLH-fusion descriptors are proposed, which combine the HaarHOG and the 3D-LBP descriptors by means of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and are able to improve upon the individual HaarHOG and 3D-LBP descriptors for image search. Subsequently, the innovative H-descriptor, and the H-fusion descriptor are presented that improve upon the 3DLH descriptor. Finally, the innovative Bag of Words-LBP (BoWL) descriptor is introduced that combines the idea of LBP with a bag-of-words representation to further improve image classification performance. To assess the feasibility of the proposed new image descriptors, two classification frameworks are used. In one, the PCA and the Enhanced Fisher Model (EFM) are applied for feature extraction and the nearest neighbor classification rule for classification. In the other, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used for classification. The classification performance is tested on several widely used and publicly available image datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed new image descriptors achieve an image classification performance better than or comparable to other popular image descriptors, such as the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), the Pyramid Histograms of visual Words (PHOW), the Pyramid Histograms of Oriented Gradients (PHOG), the Spatial Envelope (SE), the Color SIFT four Concentric Circles (C4CC), the Object Bank (OB), the Hierarchical Matching Pursuit (HMP), the Kernel Spatial Pyramid Matching (KSPM), the SIFT Sparse-coded Spatial Pyramid Matching (ScSPM), the Kernel Codebook (KC) and the LBP

Structured Knowledge Representation for Image Retrieval

We propose a structured approach to the problem of retrieval of images by content and present a description logic that has been devised for the semantic indexing and retrieval of images containing complex objects. As other approaches do, we start from low-level features extracted with image analysis to detect and characterize regions in an image. However, in contrast with feature-based approaches, we provide a syntax to describe segmented regions as basic objects and complex objects as compositions of basic ones. Then we introduce a companion extensional semantics for defining reasoning services, such as retrieval, classification, and subsumption. These services can be used for both exact and approximate matching, using similarity measures. Using our logical approach as a formal specification, we implemented a complete client-server image retrieval system, which allows a user to pose both queries by sketch and queries by example. A set of experiments has been carried out on a testbed of images to assess the retrieval capabilities of the system in comparison with expert users ranking. Results are presented adopting a well-established measure of quality borrowed from textual information retrieval

Steganalysis of digital contents, based on the analysis of unique color triplets

The new steganalytic algorithm for detection of the presence of additional information that embeds into digital images and digital videos by LSB Matching method with a small hidden capacity (not more than 0.5 bpp) is presented. The proposed steganalytic algorithm analyses digital content in the spatial domain and is based on the accounting of sequential color triads in the matrix of unique colors of the digital content. Steganalytic algorithm has a high effectiveness of detecting the additional information embedded into one arbitrary color component of the container with a small hidden capacity

Estimating snow cover from publicly available images

In this paper we study the problem of estimating snow cover in mountainous regions, that is, the spatial extent of the earth surface covered by snow. We argue that publicly available visual content, in the form of user generated photographs and image feeds from outdoor webcams, can both be leveraged as additional measurement sources, complementing existing ground, satellite and airborne sensor data. To this end, we describe two content acquisition and processing pipelines that are tailored to such sources, addressing the specific challenges posed by each of them, e.g., identifying the mountain peaks, filtering out images taken in bad weather conditions, handling varying illumination conditions. The final outcome is summarized in a snow cover index, which indicates for a specific mountain and day of the year, the fraction of visible area covered by snow, possibly at different elevations. We created a manually labelled dataset to assess the accuracy of the image snow covered area estimation, achieving 90.0% precision at 91.1% recall. In addition, we show that seasonal trends related to air temperature are captured by the snow cover index.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi

A Novel Metric Approach Evaluation For The Spatial Enhancement Of Pan-Sharpened Images

Various and different methods can be used to produce high-resolution multispectral images from high-resolution panchromatic image (PAN) and low-resolution multispectral images (MS), mostly on the pixel level. The Quality of image fusion is an essential determinant of the value of processing images fusion for many applications. Spatial and spectral qualities are the two important indexes that used to evaluate the quality of any fused image. However, the jury is still out of fused image's benefits if it compared with its original images. In addition, there is a lack of measures for assessing the objective quality of the spatial resolution for the fusion methods. So, an objective quality of the spatial resolution assessment for fusion images is required. Therefore, this paper describes a new approach proposed to estimate the spatial resolution improve by High Past Division Index (HPDI) upon calculating the spatial-frequency of the edge regions of the image and it deals with a comparison of various analytical techniques for evaluating the Spatial quality, and estimating the colour distortion added by image fusion including: MG, SG, FCC, SD, En, SNR, CC and NRMSE. In addition, this paper devotes to concentrate on the comparison of various image fusion techniques based on pixel and feature fusion technique.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1110.497