Relate that image: A tool for finding related cultural heritage images

Museums,galleries, art centers, etc. are increasingly seeing the benefits of digitalizing their art work collections –and acting on it. The more visible benefits usually have to do with advertising, involving the citizens, or creating interactive tools that get people interested in coming to museums or buying art. With the availability of these increasingly large collections, analysis of art images has gained attention from researchers.This master thesis proposes a tool to recommend paintingsthat are similar to a given image of an artwork. We define different similarity measures that include criteria existent in the metadata associated with the digitized pictures (e.g. style, genre, artist, etc.), but also image content similarity. The work is more closely related to existing approaches on automatic classification of paintings, but also shares techniques with other areas such as image clustering. Our goal is to offer a tool that can enable creative uses, support the work of gallery / museum curators, help create interesting and interactive educational content, or create clusters of images as training sets for further learning and analysis algorithms

Predicting User Interaction on Social Media using Machine Learning

Analysis of Facebook posts provides helpful information for users on social media. Current papers about user engagement on social media explore methods for predicting user engagement. These analyses of Facebook posts have included text and image analysis. Yet, the studies have not incorporate both text and image data. This research explores the usefulness of incorporating image and text data to predict user engagement. The study incorporates five types of machine learning models: text-based Neural Networks (NN), image-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Word2Vec, decision trees, and a combination of text-based NN and image-based CNN. The models are unique in their use of the data. The research collects 350k Facebook posts. The models learn and test on advertisement posts in order to predict user engagement. User engagements includes share count, comment count, and comment sentiment. The study found that combining image and text data produced the best models. The research further demonstrates that combined models outperform random models

Web image clustering by consistent utilization of visual features and surrounding texts

Image clustering, an important technology for image processing, has been actively researched for a long period of time. Especially in recent years, with the explosive growth of the Web, image clustering has even been a critical technology to help users digest the large amount of online visual information. However, as far as we know, many previous works on image clustering only used either low-level visual features or surrounding texts, but rarely exploited these two kinds of information in the same framework. To tackle this problem, we proposed a novel method named consistent bipartite graph co-partitioning in this paper, which can cluster Web images based on the consistent fusion of the information contained in both low-level features and surrounding texts. In particular, we formulated it as a constrained multiobjective optimization problem, which can be efficiently solved by semi-definite programming (SDP). Experiments on a realworld Web image collection showed that our proposed method outperformed the methods only based on low-level features or surround texts

Mining photographic collections to enhance the precision and recall of search results using semantically controlled query expansion

Driven by a larger and more diverse user-base and datasets, modern Information Retrieval techniques are striving to become contextually-aware in order to provide users with a more satisfactory search experience. While text-only retrieval methods are significantly more accurate and faster to render results than purely visual retrieval methods, these latter provide a rich complementary medium which can be used to obtain relevant and different results from those obtained using text-only retrieval. Moreover, the visual retrieval methods can be used to learn the user’s context and preferences, in particular the user’s relevance feedback, and exploit them to narrow down the search to more accurate results. Despite the overall deficiency in precision of visual retrieval result, the top results are accurate enough to be used for query expansion, when expanded in a controlled manner. The method we propose overcomes the usual pitfalls of visual retrieval: 1. The hardware barrier giving rise to prohibitively slow systems. 2. Results dominated by noise. 3. A significant gap between the low-level features and the semantics of the query. In our thesis, the first barrier is overcome by employing a simple block-based visual features which outperforms a method based on MPEG-7 features specially at early precision (precision of the top results). For the second obstacle, lists from words semantically weighted according to their degree of relation to the original query or to relevance feedback from example images are formed. These lists provide filters through which the confidence in the candidate results is assessed for inclusion in the results. This allows for more reliable Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF). This technique is then used to bridge the third barrier; the semantic gap. It consists of a second step query, re-querying the data set with an query expanded with weighted words obtained from the initial query, and semantically filtered (SF) without human intervention. We developed our PRF-SF method on the IAPR TC-12 benchmark dataset of 20,000 tourist images, obtaining promising results, and tested it on the different and much larger Belga benchmark dataset of approximately 500,000 news images originating from a different source. Our experiments confirmed the potential of the method in improving the overall Mean Average Precision, recall, as well as the level of diversity of the results measured using cluster recall