Indexing, learning and content-based retrieval for special purpose image databases

This chapter deals with content-based image retrieval in special purpose image databases. As image data is amassed ever more effortlessly, building efficient systems for searching and browsing of image databases becomes increasingly urgent. We provide an overview of the current state-of-the art by taking a tour along the entir

Semi-Automatic Identification of Humpback Whales

This paper describes current work on a photo-id system for humpback whales. Individuals of this species can be uniquely identied by the light and dark pigmentation patches on their tails. We propose semi-automatic algorithm based on marker-controlled watershed transformation for segmenting the animal's tail from the surrounding sea. We propose tting an afne invariant coordinate grid to the resulting segmentation. The grid can be adjusted according to the level of occlusion by the sea. A numerical feature vector capturing the patch-distribution with respect to the grid is then automatically extracted and used to match the individual against the database of similarly processed images