Content-based image retrieval is the set of techniques for retrieving relevant images from an image database on the basis of automatically derived image features. The need for efficient content-based image re trieval has increased tremendously in many application areas such as biomedicine, the military, commerce, education, and Web image clas sification and searching. In the biomedical domain, content-based im age retrieval can be used in patient digital libraries, clinical diagnosis, searching of 2-D electrophoresis gels, and pathology slides. I started my work on content-based image retrieval in 1995 when I was with Stanford University. The project was initiated by the Stan ford University Libraries and later funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal was to design and implement a computer system capable of indexing and retrieving large collections of digitized multimedia data available in the libraries based on the media contents. At the time, it seemed reasonable to me that I should discover the solution to the image retrieval problem during the project. Experi ence has certainly demonstrated how far we are as yet from solving this basic problem.

Klappentext

The need for efficient content-based image retrieval has increased tremendously in areas such as biomedicine, military, commerce, education, and Web image classification and searching. In the biomedical domain, content-based image retrieval can be used in patient digital libraries, clinical diagnosis, searching of 2-D electrophoresis gels, and pathology slides. Integrated Region-Based Image Retrieval presents a wavelet-based approach for feature extraction, combined with integrated region matching. An image in the database, or a portion of an image, is represented by a set of regions, roughly corresponding to objects, which are characterized by color, texture, shape, and location. A measure for the overall similarity between images is developed as a region-matching scheme that integrates properties of all the regions in the images. The advantage of using this "soft matching" is that it makes the metric robust to poor segmentation, an important property that previous research has not solved. Integrated Region-Based Image Retrieval demonstrates an experimental image retrieval system called SIMPLIcity (Semantics-sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture LIbraries). This system validates these methods on various image databases, proving that such methods perform much better and much faster than existing ones. The system is exceptionally robust to image alterations such as intensity variation, sharpness variation, intentional distortions, cropping, shifting, and rotation. These features are extremely important to biomedical image databases since visual features in the query image are not exactly the same as the visual features in the images in the database. Integrated Region-Based Image Retrieval is an excellent reference for researchers in the fields of image retrieval, multimedia, computer vision and image processing.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 1. Text-based image retrieval.- 2. Content-based image retrieval.- 3. Applications of CBIR.- 4. Summary of our work.- 5. Structure of the book.- 6. Summary.- 2. Background.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Content-based image retrieval.- 3. Image semantic classification.- 4. Summary.- 3. Wavelets.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Fourier transform.- 3. Wavelet transform.- 4. Applications of wavelets.- 5. Summary.- 4. Statistical Clustering and Classification.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Artificial intelligence and machine learning.- 3. Statistical clustering.- 4. Statistical classification.- 5. Summary.- 5. Wavelet-Based Image Indexing and Searching.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Preprocessing.- 3. Multiresolution indexing.- 4. The indexing algorithm.- 5. The matching algorithm.- 6. Performance.- 7. Limitations.- 8. Summary.- 6. Semantics-Sensitive Integrated Matching.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Overview.- 3. Image segmentation.- 4. Image classification.- 5. The similarity metric.- 6. System for biomedical image databases.- 7. Clustering for large databases.- 8. Summary.- 7. Image Classification by Image Matching.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Industrial solutions.- 3. Related work in academia.- 4. System for screening objectionable images.- 5. Classifying objectionable websites.- 6. Summary.- 8. Evaluation.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Overview.- 3. Data sets.- 4. Query interfaces.- 5. Characteristics of IRM.- 6. Accuracy.- 7. Robustness.- 8. Speed.- 9. Summary.- 9. Conclusions and Future Work.- 1. Summary.- 2. Limitations.- 3. Areas of future work.- References.