Clustering is the unsupervised classification of patterns (observations, data items, or feature vectors) into groups (clusters). The clustering problem has been addressed in many contexts and by researchers in many disciplines; this reflects its broad appeal and usefulness as one of the steps in exploratory data analysis. However, clustering is a difficult problem combinatorially, and differences in assumptions and contexts in different communities has made the transfer of useful generic concepts and methodologies slow to occur. This paper presents an overview of pattern clustering methods from a statistical pattern recognition perspective, with a goal of providing useful advice and references to fundamental concepts accessible to the broad community of clustering practitioners. We present a taxonomy of clustering techniques, and identify cross-cutting themes and recent advances. We also describe some important applications of clustering algorithms such as image segmentation, object recognition, and information retrieval.

We describe the Photobook system, which is a set of interactive tools for browsing and searching images and image sequences. These query tools differ from those used in standard image databases in that they make direct use of the image content rather than relying on text annotations. Direct search on image content is made possible by use of semantics-preserving image compression, which reduces images to a small set of perceptually-significant coefficients. We describe three types of Photobook descriptions in detail: one that allows search based on appearance, one that uses 2-D shape, and a third that allows search based on textural properties. These image content descriptions can be combined with each other and with textbased descriptions to provide a sophisticated browsing and search capability. In this paper we demonstrate Photobook on databases containing images of people, video keyframes, hand tools, fish, texture swatches, and 3-D medical data.

Figure 1: Our texture generation process takes an example texture patch (left) and a random noise (middle) as input, and modifies this random noise to make it look like the given example texture. The synthesized texture (right) can be of arbitrary size, and is perceived as very similar to the given example. Using our algorithm, textures can be generated within seconds, and the synthesized results are always tileable. Texture synthesis is important for many applications in computer graphics, vision, and image processing. However, it remains difficult to design an algorithm that is both efficient and capable of generating high quality results. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for realistic texture synthesis. The algorithm is easy to use and requires only a sample texture as input. It generates textures with perceived quality equal to or better than those produced by previous techniques, but runs two orders of magnitude faster. This permits us to apply texture synthesis to problems where it has traditionally been considered impractical. In particular, we have applied it to constrained synthesis for image editing and temporal texture generation. Our algorithm is derived from Markov Random Field texture models and generates textures through a deterministic searching process. We accelerate this synthesis process using tree-structured vector quantization.

1 Introduction Multidimensional distributions are often used in computer vision to describe and summarize different features of an image. For example, the one-dimensional distribution of image intensities describes the overall brightness content of a gray-scale image, and a three-dimensional distribution can play a similar role for color images. The texture content of an image can be described by a distribution of local signal energy over frequency. These descriptors can be used in a variety of applications including, for example, image retrieval.

AbstractÐThis paper presents a theoretically very simple, yet efficient, multiresolution approach to gray-scale and rotation invariant texture classification based on local binary patterns and nonparametric discrimination of sample and prototype distributions. The method is based on recognizing that certain local binary patterns, termed ªuniform,º are fundamental properties of local image texture and their occurrence histogram is proven to be a very powerful texture feature. We derive a generalized gray-scale and rotation invariant operator presentation that allows for detecting the ªuniformº patterns for any quantization of the angular space and for any spatial resolution and presents a method for combining multiple operators for multiresolution analysis. The proposed approach is very robust in terms of gray-scale variations since the operator is, by definition, invariant against any monotonic transformation of the gray scale. Another advantage is computational simplicity as the operator can be realized with a few operations in a small neighborhood and a lookup table. Excellent experimental results obtained in true problems of rotation invariance, where the classifier is trained at one particular rotation angle and tested with samples from other rotation angles, demonstrate that good discrimination can be achieved with the occurrence statistics of simple rotation invariant local binary patterns. These operators characterize the spatial configuration of local image texture and the performance can be further improved by combining them with rotation invariant variance measures that characterize the contrast of local image texture. The joint distributions of these orthogonal measures are shown to be very powerful tools for rotation invariant texture analysis.

Recently, methods based on local image features have shown promise for texture and object recognition tasks. This paper presents a large-scale evaluation of an approach that represents images as distributions (signatures or histograms) of features extracted from a sparse set of keypoint locations and learns a Support Vector Machine classifier with kernels based on two effective measures for comparing distributions, the Earth Mover’s Distance and the χ 2 distance. We first evaluate the performance of our approach with different keypoint detectors and descriptors, as well as different kernels and classifiers. We then conduct a comparative evaluation with several state-of-the-art recognition methods on four texture and five object databases. On most of these databases, our implementation exceeds the best reported results and achieves comparable performance on the rest. Finally, we investigate the influence of background correlations on recognition performance via extensive tests on the PASCAL database, for which ground-truth object localization information is available. Our experiments demonstrate that image representations based on distributions of local features are surprisingly effective for classification of texture and object images under challenging real-world conditions, including significant intra-class variations and substantial background clutter.

Digital library access is driven by features, but features are often context-dependent and noisy, and their relevance for a query is not always obvious. This paper describes an approach for utilizing many data-dependent, user-dependent, and task-dependent features in a semi-automated tool. Instead of requiring universal similarity measures or manual selection of relevant features, the approach provides a learning algorithm for selecting and combining groupings of the data, where groupings can be induced by highlyspecialized and context-dependent features. The selection process is guided by arichexample-based interaction with the user. The inherent combinatorics

This paper introduces a new approach tocharacterize textures at multiple scales. The performance of wavelet packet spaces are measured in terms of sensitivity and selectivity for the classi cation of twenty- ve natural textures. Both energy and entropy metrics were computed for each wavelet packet and incorporated into distinct scale space representations, where each wavelet packet (channel) re ected a speci c scale and orientation sensitivity. Wavelet packet representations for twenty- ve natural textures were classi ed without error by a simple two-layer network classi er. An analyzing function of large regularity (D 20) was shown to be slightly more e cient inrepresentation and discrimination than a similar function with fewer vanishing moments (D6). In addition, energy representations computed from the standard wavelet decomposition alone (17 features) provided classi cation without error for the twenty- ve textures included in our study. The reliability exhibited by texture signatures based on wavelet packets analysis suggest that the multiresolution properties of such transforms are bene cial for accomplishing segmentation, classication and subtle discrimination of texture. Index Terms{Feature extraction, texture analysis, texture classi cation, wavelet transform, wavelet packet, neural networks.

Algorithms exist for synthesizing a wide variety of textures over rectangular domains. However, it remains difficult to synthesize general textures over arbitrary manifold surfaces. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem for surfaces defined by dense polygon meshes. Our solution extends Wei and Levoy's texture synthesis method [25] by generalizing their definition of search neighborhoods. For each mesh vertex, we establish a local parameterization surrounding the vertex, use this parameterization to create a small rectangular neighborhood with the vertex at its center, and search a sample texture for similar neighborhoods. Our algorithm requires as input only a sample texture and a target model. Notably, it does not require specification of a global tangent vector field; it computes one as it goes - either randomly or via a relaxation process. Despite this, the synthesized texture contains no discontinuities, exhibits low distortion, and is perceived to be similar to the sample texture. We demonstrate that our solution is robust and is applicable to a wide range of textures. Keywords: Texture Synthesis, Texture Mapping, Curves & Surfaces 1

One of the fundamental challenges in pattern recognition is choosing a set of features appropriate to a class of problems. In applications such as database retrieval, it is important that image features used in pattern comparison provide good measures of image perceptual similarities. In this paper, we present an image model with a new set of features that address the challenge of perceptual similarity. The model is based on the 2-D Wold decomposition of homogeneous random fields. The three resulting mutually orthogonal subfields have perceptual properties which can be described as "periodicity", "directionality ", and "randomness", approximating what are indicated to be the three most important dimensions of human texture perception. The method presented here improves upon earlier Wold-based models in its tolerance to a variety of local inhomogeneities which arise in natural textures and its invariance under image transformation such as rotation. An image retrieval algorithm based on ...