Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has become one of the most active research areas in the past few years. Many visual feature representations have been explored and many systems built. While these research efforts establish the basis of CBIR, the usefulness of the proposed approaches is limited. Specifically, these efforts have relatively ignored two distinct characteristics of CBIR systems: (1) the gap between high level concepts and low level features; (2) subjectivity of human perception of visual content. This paper proposes a relevance feedback based interactive retrieval approach, which effectively takes into account the above two characteristics in CBIR. During the retrieval process, the user's high level query and perception subjectivity are captured by dynamically updated weights based on the user's feedback. The experimental results over more than 70,000 images show that the proposed approach greatly reduces the user's effort of composing a query and captures the user's i...

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the technical achievements in the research area of image retrieval, especially content-based image retrieval, an area that has been so active and prosperous in the past few years. The survey includes 100+ papers covering the research aspects of image feature representation and extraction, multidimensional indexing, and system design, three of the fundamental bases of content-based image retrieval. Furthermore, based on the state-of-the-art technology available now and the demand from real-world applications, open research issues are identified and future promising research directions are suggested. C ○ 1999 Academic Press 1.

this document.

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the technical achievements in the research area of Image Retrieval, especially Content-Based Image Retrieval, an area so active and prosperous in the past few years. The survey includes 100+ papers covering the research aspects of image feature representation and extraction, multi-dimensional indexing, and system design, three of the fundamental bases of Content-Based Image Retrieval. Furthermore, based on the state-of-the-art technology available now and the demand from real-world applications, open research issues are identified, and future promising research directions are suggested. 1. INTRODUCTION Recent years have seen a rapid increase of the size of digital image collections. Everyday, both military and civilian equipment generates giga-bytes of images. Huge amount of information is out there. However, we can not access to or make use of the information unless it is organized so as to allow efficient browsing, searching and retriev...

Abstract—Texture features that are based on the local power spectrum obtained by a bank of Gabor filters are compared. The features differ in the type of nonlinear post-processing which is applied to the local power spectrum. The following features are considered: Gabor energy, complex moments, and grating cell operator features. The capability of the corresponding operators to produce distinct feature vector clusters for different textures is compared using two methods: the Fisher criterion and the classification result comparison. Both methods give consistent results. The grating cell operator gives the best discrimination and segmentation results. The texture detection capabilities of the operators and their robustness to nontexture features are also compared. The grating cell operator is the only one that selectively responds only to texture and does not give false response to nontexture features such as object contours. Index Terms—Classification, complex moments, discrimination,

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has become one of the most active research areas in the past few years. Many visual feature representations have been explored and many systems built. While these research efforts establish the basis of CBIR, the usefulness of the proposed approaches is limited. Specifically, these e#orts have relatively ignored two distinct characteristics of CBIR systems: (1) the gap between high level concepts and low level features; (2) subjectivity of human perception of visual content. This paper proposes a relevance feedback based interactive retrieval approach, which effectively takes into account the above two characteristics in CBIR. During the retrieval process, the user's high level query and perception subjectivity are captured by dynamically updated weights based on the user's relevance feedback. The experimental results show that the proposed approach greatly reduces the user's effort of composing a query and captures the user's information need more precise...

In this paper we propose a technique for segmenting images by texture content with application to indexing images in a large image database. Using a quad-tree decomposition, texture features are extracted from spatial blocks at a hierarchy of scales in each image. The quad-tree is grown by iteratively testing conditions for splitting parent blocks based on texture content of children blocks. While this approach does not achieve smooth identification of texture region borders, homogeneous blocks of texture are extracted which can be used in a database index. Furthermore, this technique performs the segmentation directly using image spatial-frequency data. In the segmentation reported here, texture features are extracted from the wavelet representation of the image. This method however, can use other subband decompositions including Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), which has been adopted by the JPEG standard for image coding. This makes our segmentation method extremely applicable to databases containing compressed image data. We show application of the texture segmentation towards providing a new method for searching for images in large image databases using “Query-by-texture.” 1.

This paper presents the current status of a new initiative aimed at developing a versatile framework and image database for empirical evaluation of texture analysis algorithms. The proposed Outex framework contains a large collection of surface textures captured under different conditions, which facilitates construction of a wide range of texture analysis problems. The problems are encapsulated into test suites, for which baseline results obtained with algorithms from literature are provided. The rich functionality of the framework is demonstrated with examples in texture classification, segmentation and retrieval. The framework has a web site for public dissemination of the database and comparative results obtained by research groups world wide. 1.

Abstract. We have carried out a detailed evaluation of the use of texture features in a query-by-example approach to image retrieval. We used 3 radically different texture feature types motivated by i) statistical, ii) psychological and iii) signal processing points of view. The features were evaluated and tested on retrieval tasks from the Corel and TRECVID2003 image collections. For the latter we also looked at the effects of combining texture features with a colour feature. 1

Texture is an important part of the visual world of animals and humans and their visual systems successfully detect, discriminate, and segment texture. Relatively recently progress was made concerning structures in the brain that are presumably responsible for texture processing. Neurophysiologists reported on the discovery of a new type of orientation selective neuron in areas V1 and V2 of the visual cortex of monkeys which they called grating cells. Such cells respond vigorously to a grating of bars of appropriate orientation, position and periodicity. In contrast to other orientation selective cells, grating cells respond very weakly or not at all to single bars which do not make part of a grating. Elsewhere we proposed a nonlinear model of this type of cell and demonstrated the advantages of grating cells with respect to the separation of texture and form information. In this paper, we use grating cell operators to obtain features and compare these operators in texture analysis tas...