Content-based image retrieval

About: Content-based image retrieval is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6916 publications have been published within this topic receiving 150696 citations. The topic is also known as: CBIR.

Image retrieval and perceptual similarity

Abstract: Simple, low-level visual features are extensively used for content-based image retrieval. Our goal was to evaluate an image-indexing system based on some of the known properties of the early stages of human vision. We quantitatively measured the relationship between the similarity order induced by the indexes and perceived similarity. In contrast to previous evaluation approaches, we objectively measured similarity both for the few best-matching images and also for relatively distinct images. The results show that, to a large degree, the rank orders induced by the indexes predict the perceived similarity between images. The highest index concordance employing a single index was obtained using the chromaticity histogram. Combining different information sources substantially improved the correspondence with the observers. We conclude that image-indexing systems can provide useful measures for perceptual image similarity. The methods presented here can be used to evaluate and compare different image-retrieval systems.

Automatic Color Based Reassembly of Fragmented Images and Paintings

Abstract: The problem of reassembling image fragments arises in many scientific fields, such as forensics and archaeology. In the field of archaeology, the pictorial excavation findings are almost always in the form of painting fragments. The manual execution of this task is very difficult, as it requires great amount of time, skill and effort. Thus, the automation of such a work is very important and can lead to faster, more efficient, painting reassembly and to a significant reduction in the human effort involved. In this paper, an integrated method for automatic color based 2-D image fragment reassembly is presented. The proposed 2-D reassembly technique is divided into four steps. Initially, the image fragments which are probably spatially adjacent, are identified utilizing techniques employed in content based image retrieval systems. The second operation is to identify the matching contour segments for every retained couple of image fragments, via a dynamic programming technique. The next step is to identify the optimal transformation in order to align the matching contour segments. Many registration techniques have been evaluated to this end. Finally, the overall image is reassembled from its properly aligned fragments. This is achieved via a novel algorithm, which exploits the alignment angles found during the previous step. In each stage, the most robust algorithms having the best performance are investigated and their results are fed to the next step. We have experimented with the proposed method using digitally scanned images of actual torn pieces of paper image prints and we produced very satisfactory reassembly results.

Integrated color, texture and shape information for content-based image retrieval

Abstract: Feature extraction and the use of the features as query terms are crucial problems in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. The main focus in this paper is on integrated color, texture and shape extraction methods for CBIR. We have developed original CBIR methodology that uses Gabor filtration for determining the number of regions of interest (ROIs), in which fast and effective feature extraction is performed. In the ROIs extracted, texture features based on thresholded Gabor features, color features based on histograms, color moments in YUV space, and shape features based on Zernike moments are then calculated. The features presented proved to be efficient in determining similarity between images. Our system was tested on postage stamp images and Corel photo libraries and can be used in CBIR applications such as postal services.

Scalable search-based image annotation of personal images

Abstract: With the prevalence of digital cameras, more and more people have considerable digital images on their personal devices. As a result, there are increasing needs to effectively search these personal images. Automatic image annotation may serve the goal, for the annotated keywords could facilitate the search processes. Although many image annotation methods have been proposed in recent years, their effectiveness on arbitrary personal images is constrained by their limited scalability, i.e. limited lexicon of small-scale training set. To be scalable, we propose a search-based image annotation (SBIA) algorithm that is analogous to Web page search. First, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) technology is used to retrieve a set of visually similar images from a large-scale Web image set. Then, a text-based keyword search (TBKS) technique is used to obtain a ranked list of candidate annotations for each retrieved image. Finally, a fusion algorithm is used to combine the ranked lists into the final annotation list. The application of both efficient search technologies and Web-scale image set guarantees the scalability of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results on U. Washington dataset show not only the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm but also the advantage of image retrieval using annotation results over that using visual features.