An Image Thesaurus for Content Based Search Using Texture and Color

这个项目的主要目标是开发一个图像同义词库，以促进对大型数字图像/视频库的基于内容的搜索。随着计算机和通信技术的进步，目前信息处理工具的局限性变得更加明显，在卫星和医学图像数据库等媒体丰富的数据的背景下尤其明显。图像或视觉辞典为此类多媒体数据的相似性搜索和索引提供了概念框架。在数据摄取时，对感兴趣的图像特征(如颜色、纹理、空间位置和形状)进行计算和聚类，以得到特征码书。使用特定于应用的信息和用户要求来使该代码簿结构自适应。到码字的映射是分层的，并且可以使用几个基本特征的分组来表示高级结构化视觉概念。该词库构建的关键组件包括新的时空分割算法，以及用于在特征空间中进行高效搜索和索引的降维和学习算法。该辞典的潜在应用包括地理信息系统、医学图像、使用图像内容在互联网上进行搜索，以及在新的图像/视频编码标准中，如MPEG7。将开发一个包含图像辞典的原型检索系统，并将在搜索航空照片数据库和库存照片图库方面展示其有效性。

The main goal of this project is to develop an image thesaurus to facilitate content based search of large digital image/video libraries. As computers and communications technology advance, limitations of current information processing tools are becoming more apparent, and is particularly visible in the context of media rich data such as satellite and medical imagery databases. The image or visual thesaurus provides a conceptual framework for similarity search and indexing of such multimedia data. At the time of data ingest, image features of interest, such as color, texture, spatial location and shape, are computed and clustered to give a feature code book. Application specific information and user requirements are used to make this code book construction adaptive. The mapping to code words is hierarchical and groupings of several basic features can be used to represent high level structured visual concepts. Key components in this thesaurus construction include new spatio-temporal segmentation algorithms, and dimensionality reduction and learning algorithms for efficient search and indexing in the feature space. Potential applications of this thesaurus include geographic information systems, medical imagery, searching on the Internet using image content, and in new image/video coding standards such as MPEG-7. A prototype retrieval system incorporating an image thesaurus will be developed and its effectiveness will be demonstrated on searching airphoto databases and stock photo galleries.