Exploring Image Data-Bases Using Novel Similarity Metrics

使用新颖的相似性度量探索图像数据库

• 批准号: 9712833
• 负责人: Carlo Tomasi
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1997
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1997-09-01 至 2001-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9712833&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Exploring; Image; Data; Bases; Using

Continued reductions in the prices of mass storage and widespread access to computer networks, especially the Internet, have given a large number of users access to vast amounts of information. Much of this information is pictorial, often ordinary images stored in digital form. Yet the tools available for organizing, browsing, and interrogating such image data have not kept pace with the volume of information made available. This research develops a novel way of summarizing and indexing images and other pictorial data based on their appearance, and more specifically on their color, shape, and texture content. These descriptors, called image signatures, are uniform, compact, flexible, robust, and intuitive. The notion of the Earth-Mover's Distance between signatures is introduced and used to give a metric structure to the image space. This metric structure, together with additional geometric information, is then exploited to provide efficient nearest-neighbor search algorithms, as well as to compute distance-preserving embeddings of the image space, or portions thereof, into a low-dimensional Euclidean space. Such embeddings, obtained using multi-dimensional scaling, allow the user to visualize intuitively both local image neighborhoods of interest, or the entire image space at once. The user is able to navigate around the image space intuitively, with a sense of continuity and comprehensiveness, unlike current systems which typically present fragments of the data-base in a disconnected fashion. These tools then enable a novel metaphor for exploring image data- bases, making it more akin to the familiar browsing of a library or a bookstore.

大容量存储器价格的持续下降和对计算机网络，特别是因特网的广泛使用，使大量用户能够获得大量信息。这些信息大部分是图片化的，通常是以数字形式存储的普通图像。然而，可用于组织、浏览和询问此类图像数据的工具没有跟上可用信息量的步伐。这项研究开发了一种新的方法，根据图像和其他图片数据的外观，更具体地说，根据它们的颜色、形状和纹理内容来汇总和索引图像和其他图片数据。这些称为图像签名的描述符是统一、紧凑、灵活、健壮和直观的。引入了地球移动者两个签名之间的距离的概念，并将其用于给出图像空间的度量结构。然后，利用该度量结构以及附加的几何信息来提供有效的最近邻搜索算法，以及计算图像空间或其部分在低维欧氏空间中的距离保持嵌入。使用多维缩放获得的这种嵌入允许用户直观地同时可视化感兴趣的局部图像邻域或整个图像空间。与通常以断开方式呈现数据库片段的当前系统不同，用户能够直观地在图像空间中导航，具有连续性和全面性。然后，这些工具为探索图像数据库提供了一个新的隐喻，使其更类似于人们熟悉的图书馆或书店的浏览。