A new interactive semi-supervised clustering model for large image database indexing

BackgroundThere is increasing interest in the development of computational methods to analyze fluorescent microscopy images and enable automated large-scale analysis of the subcellular localization of proteins. Determining the subcellular localization is an integral part of identifying a protein's function, and the application of bioinformatics to this problem provides a valuable tool for the annotation of proteomes. Training and validating algorithms used in image analysis research typically rely on large sets of image data, and would benefit from a large, well-annotated and highly-available database of images and associated metadata.DescriptionThe Yeast Resource Center Public Image Repository (YRC PIR) is a large database of images depicting the subcellular localization and colocalization of proteins. Designed especially for computational biologists who need large numbers of images, the YRC PIR contains 532,182 TIFF images from nearly 85,000 separate experiments and their associated experimental data. All images and associated data are searchable, and the results browsable, through an intuitive web interface. Search results, experiments, individual images or the entire dataset may be downloaded as standards-compliant OME-TIFF data.ConclusionsThe YRC PIR is a powerful resource for researchers to find, view, and download many images and associated metadata depicting the subcellular localization and colocalization of proteins, or classes of proteins, in a standards-compliant format. The YRC PIR is freely available at http://images.yeastrc.org/.

The multi-model method is used in complex system modeling or industrial data monitoring, and its goal is to establish the sub-models corresponding to different conditions. How to divide the modeling data into datasets corresponding to different conditions in the case of insufficient prior knowledge of the process is an important problem to be solved. Machine learning provides many excellent algorithms for condition identification. However, many algorithms are easily affected by abnormal data, but making full use of prior knowledge can effectively solve this problem. Based on the semi-supervised clustering, mixed constraints which include composite distance and the pairwise constraint are introduced to distinguish strongly and weakly dependent data and clarify boundary data to realize a multi-model condition division of thermal process data. Radial Basis Function neural network is used to realize feature learning, and an online condition identification is constructed. The influence of network structure and parameters on the generalization ability of the recognizer is analyzed. On the premise of not significantly increasing the amount of calculation, the generalization ability is improved by adjusting the weight coefficient in the composite distance, and the weight coefficient under low error rate is given by particle swarm optimization. Compared with classic the methods, such as Sliding Windows, Bottom-Up and Top-Down, the proposed method has better performance in segmentation results.Article HighlightsThe thermal process data in a segment is divided into strongly and weakly dependent data, and different segmentation methods are given.The definition of composite distance parameter, including time component, value component and velocity component, is given to distinguish different types of data.The semi-supervised clustering with mixed constraints, superimposing composite distance constraint and pairwise constraint, is given to segment the thermal process data.

Clustering is often considered as an unsupervised data analysis method, but making full use of the prior information in the process of clustering will significantly improve the performance of the clustering algorithm. Spectral clustering algorithm can well use the prior pairwise constraint information to cluster and has become a new hot spot of machine learning research in recent years. In this paper, we propose an effective clustering algorithm, called a semi-supervised spectral clustering algorithm based on pairwise constraints, in which the similarity matrix of data points is adjusted and optimized by pairwise constraints. The experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm.

Without textual descriptions or label information of images, searching semantic concepts in image databases is still a very challenging task. While automatic annotation techniques are yet along way off, we can seek other alternative techniques to solve this difficult issue. In this paper, we propose to learn Web images for searching the semantic concepts in large image databases. To formulate effective algorithms, we suggest to engage the support vector machines for attacking the problem. We evaluate our algorithm in a large image database and demonstrate the preliminary yet promising results.

This paper presents semi-supervised agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm using clusterwise tolerance based pairwise constraints. In semi-supervised clustering, pairwise constraints, that is, must-link and cannot-link, are frequently used in order to improve clustering properties. From that sense, we will propose another way named clusterwise tolerance based pairwise constraints to handle must-link and cannot-link constraints inL2-space. In addition, we will propose semi-supervised agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm based on it. We will, moreover, show the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical examples.

Searching large image databases is a time consuming process when done manually. Current CBIR methods mostly rely on training data in specific domains. When source and domain of images are unknown, unsupervised methods provide better solutions. In this work, we use a hierarchical clustering scheme to group images in an unknown and large image database. In addition, the user should provide the current class assignment of a small number of images as a feedback to the system. The proposed method uses this feedback to guess the number of required clusters, and optimizes the weight vector in an iterative manner. In each step, after modification of the weight vector, the images are reclustered. We compared our method with a similar approach (but without users feedback) named CLUE. Our experimental results show that by considering the user feedback, the accuracy of clustering is considerably improved.

The main objective of image browsers is to empower users to find a desired image with ease, speed and accuracy from a large database. In this paper we present a novel approach at creating an image browsing environment based on human perception with the aim of providing intuitive image navigation. In our approach, similarity judgments form the basic structural organization for the images in our browser. To enrich this we have developed a scalable crowd sourced method of augmenting a database with a large number of additional samples by capturing human judgments from members of a crowd. Experiments were conducted involving two databases that demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as an intuitive, fast browsing environment for large image databases.

Query by image content is a method to retrieve the most important images from the image database. It is an answer for the problem of searching for digital images in large database. A large number of relevance feedback schemes have been developed to improve the performance of content based image retrieval. In this paper we propose biased discriminant Euclidean embedding that form intraclass geometry and interclass discrimination. In this method images can be grouped by their similarity. In order to achieve this, firstly the visual features of the images are found out. In addition to this we use two clustering algorithms to assemble the images into clusters using their low level visual features. Here we have to filter the images in the hierarchical clustering and then apply the clustered images to K-Means, so that we can get the most relevant images. Query image is compared directly with the images in the clusters. Therefore number of comparisons is reduced because query image is compared only with the images in the clusters instead of comparing with all images in the database.

In unsupervised clustering tasks, incorporating pairwise constraints as prior information has become an effective approach to improve clustering quality. Building upon the efficient clustering algorithm k-sums, which unifies the frameworks of K-means and Ratio-cut, this paper introduces a novel semi-supervised clustering algorithm by integrating prior pairwise constraints. On one hand, the proposed method inherits the ability of k-sums to handle large-scale data and complex cluster structures with linear time complexity. On the other hand, it enhances clustering discriminability and robustness through constraint-based optimization under semi-supervised settings. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing mainstream semi-supervised clustering approaches in both clustering accuracy and computational efficiency, showing strong practical value and promising scalability.

We live in the era of big data with dataset sizes growing steadily over the past decades. In addition, obtaining expert labels for all the instances is time-consuming and in many cases may not even be possible. This necessitates the development of advanced semi-supervised models that can learn from both labeled and unlabeled data points and also scale at worst linearly with the number of examples. In the context of kernel based semi-supervised models, constructing the training kernel matrix for the large training dataset is expensive and memory inefficient. This paper investigates the scalability of the recently proposed multi-class semi-supervised kernel spectral clustering model (MSSKSC) by means of random Fourier features. The proposed model maps the input data into an explicit low-dimensional feature space. Thanks to the explicit feature maps, one can then solve the MSSKSC optimization formation in the primal, making the complexity of the method linear in number of training data points. The performance of the proposed model is compared with that of recently introduced reduced kernel techniques and Nystrom based MSSKSC approaches. Experimental results demonstrate the scalability, efficiency and faster training computation times of the proposed model over conventional large scale semi-supervised models on large scale real-life datasets.

In this paper, a novel semi-supervised subtractive clustering method using pair wise constraints is proposed. Because the traditional subtractive clustering method cannot obtain the better clustering accuracies, some pair wise constraints regarded as supervised information are applied to aiding the process of the traditional subtractive clustering. Experimental results show that the new presented semi-supervised clustering method can improve the clustering performance significantly compared to the unsupervised subtractive clustering.

Image database visualisations, in particular mapping-based visualisations, provide an interesting approach to accessing image repositories as they are able to overcome some of the drawbacks associated with retrieval based approaches. However, making a mapping-based approach work efficiently on large remote image databases, has yet to be explored. In this paper, we present Web-Based Images Browser (WBIB), a novel system that efficiently employs image pyramids to reduce bandwidth requirements so that users can interactively explore large remote image databases.

In this article, we evaluate the effectiveness of a pre-classification scheme for the fast retrieval of faces in a large image database. The studied approach is based on a partitioning of the face space through a clustering of face images. Mainly two issues are discussed. How to perform clustering with a non-trivial probabilistic measure of similarity between faces? How to assign face images to all clusters probabilistically to form a robust characterization vector? It is shown experimentally on the FERET face database that, with this simple approach, the cost of a search can be reduced by a factor 6 or 7 with no significant degradation of the performance.

Semi-supervised clustering leverages side information such as pairwise constraints to guide clustering procedures. Despite promising progress, existing semi-supervised clustering approaches overlook the condition of side information being generated sequentially, which is a natural setting arising in numerous real-world applications such as social network and e-commerce system analysis. Given emerged new constraints, classical semi-supervised clustering algorithms need to re-optimize their objectives over all data samples and constraints in availability, which prevents them from efficiently updating the obtained data partitions. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient dynamic semi-supervised clustering framework that casts the clustering problem into a search problem over a feasible convex set, i.e., a convex hull with its extreme points being an ensemble of m data partitions. According to the principle of ensemble clustering, the optimal partition lies in the convex hull, and can thus be uniquely represented by an m-dimensional probability simplex vector. As such, the dynamic semi-supervised clustering problem is simplified to the problem of updating a probability simplex vector subject to the newly received pairwise constraints. We then develop a computationally efficient updating procedure to update the probability simplex vector in O(m2) time, irrespective of the data size n. Our empirical studies on several real-world benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised clustering algorithms with visible performance gain and significantly reduced running time.

Retrieving hidden information in image databases is a difficult task because of their complex structure and the subjectivity related to their interpretation. In this situation the use of an index is primordial. We propose an effective method for locally updating neighborhood graphs which constitute our index. This method is based on an intelligent way for locating points in a multidimensional space. Promising results are obtained after experimentations on various databases.