Abstract—The goal of this work is to accurately detect and localize boundaries in natural scenes using local image measurements. We formulate features that respond to characteristic changes in brightness, color, and texture associated with natural boundaries. In order to combine the information from these features in an optimal way, we train a classifier using human labeled images as ground truth. The output of this classifier provides the posterior probability of a boundary at each image location and orientation. We present precision-recall curves showing that the resulting detector significantly outperforms existing approaches. Our two main results are 1) that cue combination can be performed adequately with a simple linear model and 2) that a proper, explicit treatment of texture is required to detect boundaries in natural images. Index Terms—Texture, supervised learning, cue combination, natural images, ground truth segmentation data set, boundary detection, boundary localization. 1

We have witnessed great interest and a wealth of promise in content-based image retrieval as an emerging technology. While the last decade laid foundation to such promise, it also paved the way for a large number of new techniques and systems, got many new people involved, and triggered stronger association of weakly related fields. In this article, we survey almost 300 key theoretical and empirical contributions in the current decade related to image retrieval and automatic image annotation, and in the process discuss the spawning of related subfields. We also discuss significant challenges involved in the adaptation of existing image retrieval techniques to build systems that can be useful in the real world. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, we also conjecture what the future may hold for image retrieval research.

Given a set S of n sites (points), and a distance measure d, the nearest neighbor searching problem is to build a data structure so that given a query point q, the site nearest to q can be found quickly. This paper gives a data structure for this problem; the data structure is built using the distance function as a “black box”. The structure is able to speed up nearest neighbor searching in a variety of settings, for example: points in low-dimensional or structured Euclidean space, strings under Hamming and edit distance, and bit vector data from an OCR application. The data structures are observed to need linear space, with a modest constant factor. The preprocessing time needed per site is observed to match the query time. The data structure can be viewed as an application of a “kd-tree ” approach in the metric space setting, using Voronoi regions of a subset in place of axis-aligned boxes. 1

This article introduces a texture representation suitable for recognizing images of textured surfaces under a wide range of transformations, including viewpoint changes and non-rigid deformations. At the feature extraction stage, a sparse set of affine Harris and Laplacian regions is found in the image. Each of these regions can be thought of as a texture element having a characteristic elliptic shape and a distinctive appearance pattern. This pattern is captured in an affine-invariant fashion via a process of shape normalization followed by the computation of two novel descriptors, the spin image and the RIFT descriptor. When affine invariance is not required, the original elliptical shape serves as an additional discriminative feature for texture recognition. The proposed approach is evaluated in retrieval and classi-fication tasks using the entire Brodatz database and a publicly available collection of 1000 photographs of textured surfaces taken from different viewpoints.

Abstract. This paper describes a simple framework for automatically annotating images using non-parametric models of distributions of image features. We show that under this framework quite simple image properties such as global colour and texture distributions provide a strong basis for reliably annotating images. We report results on subsets of two photographic libraries, the Corel Photo Archive and the Getty Image Archive. We also show how the popular Earth Mover’s Distance measure can be effectively incorporated within this framework. 1

We identify privacy risks associated with releasing network data sets and provide an algorithm that mitigates those risks. A network consists of entities connected by links representing relations such as friendship, communication, or shared activity. Maintaining privacy when publishing networked data is uniquely challenging because an individual’s network context can be used to identify them even if other identifying information is removed. In this paper, we quantify the privacy risks associated with three classes of attacks on the privacy of individuals in networks, based on the knowledge used by the adversary. We show that the risks of these attacks vary greatly based on network structure and size. We propose a novel approach to anonymizing network data that models aggregate network structure and then allows samples to be drawn from that model. The approach guarantees anonymity for network entities while preserving the ability to estimate a wide variety of network measures with relatively little bias.

Image registration is the process of establishing a common geometric reference frame between two or more image data sets possibly taken at different times. In this paper we present a method for computing elastic registration and warping maps based on the Monge–Kantorovich theory of optimal mass transport. This mass transport method has a number of important characteristics. First, it is parameter free. Moreover, it utilizes all of the grayscale data in both images, places the two images on equal footing and is symmetrical: the optimal mapping from image to ¡ image being the inverse of the optimal mapping ¡ from to  £ ¢ The method does not require that landmarks be specified, and the minimizer of the distance functional involved is unique; there are no other local minimizers. Finally, optimal transport naturally takes into account changes in density that result from changes in area or volume. Although the optimal transport method is certainly not appropriate for all registration and warping problems, this mass preservation property makes the Monge-Kantorovich approach quite useful for an interesting class of warping problems, as we show in this paper. Our method for finding the registration mapping is based on a partial differential equation approach to the minimization of ¤¦ ¥ the Kantorovich–Wasserstein or “Earth Mover’s Distance ” under a mass preservation constraint. We show how this approach leads to practical algorithms, and demonstrate our method with a number of examples, including those from the medical field. We also extended this method to take into account changes in intensity, and show that it is well suited for applications such as image morphing. A. Image Registration I.

Probabilistic approaches are a promising solution to the image retrieval problem that, when compared to standard retrieval methods, can lead to a significant gain in retrieval accuracy. However, this occurs at the cost of a significant increase in computational complexity. In fact, closed-form solutions for probabilistic retrieval are currently available only for simple probabilistic models such as the Gaussian or the histogram. We analyze the case of mixture densities and exploit the asymptotic equivalence between likelihood and Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence to derive solutions for these models. In particular, 1) we show that the divergence can be computed exactly for vector quantizers (VQs) and 2) has an approximate solution for Gauss mixtures (GMs) that, in high-dimensional feature spaces, introduces no significant degradation of the resulting similarity judgments. In both cases, the new solutions have closed-form and computational complexity equivalent to that of standard retrieval approaches.

DRAFT We propose EMD-L1: a fast and exact algorithm for computing the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) between a pair of histograms. The efficiency of the new algorithm enables its application to problems that were previously prohibitive due to high time complexities. The proposed EMD-L1 significantly simplifies the original linear programming formulation of EMD. Exploiting the L1 metric structure, the number of unknown variables in EMD-L1 is reduced to O(N) from O(N 2) of the original EMD for a histogram with N bins. In addition, the number of constraints is reduced by half and the objective function of the linear program is simplified. Formally without any approximation, we prove that the EMD-L1 formulation is equivalent to the original EMD with a L1 ground distance. To perform the EMD-L1 computation, we propose an efficient tree-based algorithm, Tree-EMD. Tree-EMD exploits the fact that a basic feasible solution of the simplex algorithm-based solver forms a spanning tree when we interpret EMD-L1 as a network flow optimization problem. We empirically show that this new algorithm has average time complexity of O(N 2), which significantly improves the best reported super-cubic complexity of the original EMD. The accuracy of the proposed methods is evaluated by

In this paper, we cast natural-image segmentation as a problem of clustering texture features as multivariate mixed data. We model the distribution of the texture features using a mixture of Gaussian distributions. Unlike most existing clustering methods, we allow the mixture components to be degenerate or nearly-degenerate. We contend that this assumption is particularly important for mid-level image segmentation, where degeneracy is typically introduced by using a common feature representation for different textures in an image. We show that such a mixture distribution can be effectively segmented by a simple agglomerative clustering algorithm derived from a lossy data compression approach. Using either 2D texture filter banks or simple fixed-size windows to obtain texture features, the algorithm effectively segments an image by minimizing the overall coding length of the feature vectors. We conduct comprehensive experiments to measure the performance of the algorithm in terms of visual evaluation and a variety of quantitative indices for image segmentation. The algorithm compares favorably against other well-known image-segmentation methods on the Berkeley image database.