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典，以促进大型数字图像/视频库的基于内容的搜索。随着计算机和通信技术的进步，当前信息处理工具的局限性越来越明显，在卫星和医学图像数据库等媒体数据丰富的情况下尤其明显。图像或视觉同义词典为这种多媒体数据的相似性搜索和索引提供了一个概念框架。在数据摄取时，对图像的颜色、纹理、空间位置和形状等感兴趣的特征进行计算和聚类，得到一个特征代码本。应用程序的特定信息和用户需求用于使该代码本结构具有适应性。到码字的映射是分层的，几个基本特征的分组可以用来表示高级结构化的视觉概念。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高效搜索和索引的降维和学习算法。该词库的潜在应用包括地理信息系统、医学图像、使用图像内容在Internet上进行搜索以及新的图像/视频编码标准，如MPEG-7。将开发一个包含图像词库的原型检索系统，并将在搜索航空照片数据库和库存图片库方面证明其有效性。

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.