Combining re-ranking and rank aggregation methods for image retrieval

As the use of digital media increases, effective retrieval and management techniques become more important. In order to extract useful information from this huge amount of data, many content based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have been developed. A typical CBIR system captures image features such as color, texture, or shape of objects in the query image and tries to retrieve images from the database with similar features. The main advantage of CBIR systems with relevance feedback is that these systems take into account the gap between the high-level concepts and low-level features and subjectivity of human perception of visual content. In this paper, a CBIR system based on color histogram has been presented and a new approach for image storage and retrieval called association-based image retrieval (ABIR) has been studied. The results of both systems have been shown.

Histogram refinement for texture descriptor based image retrieval

Introduction: Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) retrieves the images from the vast image repositories. Research in the CBIR domain gets attention due to the massive number of images generated by the mobiles and various image-capturing machines. Objectives: Any image retrieval system’s primary goal is to reduce the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level perception. Methods: The CBIR techniques are classified into multiple categories based on the feature extraction and retrieval mechanism. These categories are feature-based, machine-learning-based, and deep-learning-based methods. The pioneer techniques for each category are explained in detail in this chapter. Results: The comparative analysis has been done to highlight the advantages of techniques over others. Conclusion: The various application area of the CBIR has been described. The most evolving application is the content-based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) system. The applicability of the CBMIR system in different medical science domains is explained in detail.

There is a growing trend for using content‐based image retrieval (CBIR) systems these days because of the constantly growing interest in digital content. Therefore, the ability of the CBIR to perform the CBIR process will depend on the feature extraction process and its basis, for the retrieval will be done on. Numerous researchers put forward various techniques for feature extraction to enhance the nature of the system. Since features play a very key role in enhancing performance, various features can be used collectively to attain the requisite goal. To retain this in mind, we present in this paper a multifeature fusion system, where three features are integrated and form one feature to improve the situation of retrieval. For this purpose, scale‐invariant feature transform (SIFT), speeded‐up robust features (SURF), and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) features are adopted. These features are common features that deliver information about the shape of the object and for matching purposes, two techniques of distance matching such as Euclidean and Hausdrauff distance are adopted. To assess the performance of the proposed multifeature‐based CBIR approach, experiments were conducted with the usage of a MATLAB simulator. The Corel‐1000 dataset, consisting of 10,000 images in 100 semantic classes, turned into applied, with each magnificence containing 100 images. A subset of 2500 images across 50 semantic classes was used to train the system. This research aligns with industry, innovation, and infrastructure by contributing to advancements in image processing and retrieval systems. Key characteristic descriptors, along with SIFT, SURF, HOG, texture, and multicharacteristic combinations, were extracted for retrieval functions. The results display that the usage of the Hausdrauff distance as a similarity degree outperforms Euclidean distance, accomplishing retrieval accuracies of 80.02% for HOG, 77.9% for SIFT, 79. 8% for SURF, 77.2% for texture, and 84.2% for multicharacteristic combinations, surpassing Euclidean distance results via 1.7%–3.6% across capabilities. These findings underscore the effectiveness of Hausdrauff distance in enhancing retrieval precision within the CBIR framework.

Bag of Features (BoF) has been successfully exploited in content-based image retrieval for several years. Due to its performance and popularity, several extensions have been proposed that involve feature description, dictionary building, feature encoding and post-query process, etc. This paper proposes a dynamically weighting scheme for BoF-based image retrieval based on feedback. It involves two contributions: (i) analyzing the statistical distribution characteristic of similar BoF representations and (ii) computing weights dynamically based on the feedback obtained from different initial query results. We quantitatively evaluate the proposed method on two different databases. Experiments confirm that the proposed weighting scheme has better performance than the baseline of BoF-based image retrieval systems. Meanwhile, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the weighting scheme in terms of the precision of top-N returned images.

With the rapid advancement of digital imaging technologies, and the use of large volume image databases in various applications, it becomes imperative to build an automatic and an efficient image retrieval system. Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is most emerging and vivid research area in computer vision, in which unknown query image assigns to the closest possible similar images available in the database. Current systems mainly use colour, texture, and shape information for image retrieval using similarity measures between query and database images features. Here this work, proposed a classification system that allows recognizing and recovering the class of a query image based on its visual content. This successful categorization of images greatly enhances the performance of retrieval by filtering out irrelevant classes. In this way we have done the comparative analysis of various features as an individual or in combinations, with direct similarity measure and proposed framework. Experimentson benchmark Wang database show that the proposed classification & retrieval framework performs significantly better than the common framework of distances.

In a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system, indexing feature vectors and the similarity measure between feature vectors are two key factors for retrieval performance. We present a new CBIR system with statistical-model based image feature extraction in the wavelet domain and a Kullback divergence based similarity measure. A two component Gaussian mixture model (GMM) in the wavelet domain is employed and the model parameters are used to form features for image indexing. A new Kullback divergence based similarity measure is then presented for image retrieval. The experimental results demonstrate that the similarity measure based on the Kullback divergence is more effective than conventional similarity measures, such as the city-block distance and the Euclidean distance. It is shown that the new CBIR system, with the combination of the GMM and the new Kullback divergence based similarity measure, outperforms most other methods in retrieval performance for texture images, while keeping a comparable level of computational complexity.

A content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system is proposed for the retrieval of T1-weighted contrast-enhanced MRI (CE-MRI) images of brain tumors. In this CBIR system, spatial information in the bag-of-visual-words model and domain knowledge on the brain tumor images are considered for the representation of brain tumor images. A similarity metric is learned through a distance metric learning algorithm to reduce the gap between the visual features and the semantic concepts in an image. The learned similarity metric is then used to measure the similarity between two images and then retrieve the most similar images in the dataset when a query image is submitted to the CBIR system. The retrieval performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a brain CE-MRI dataset with three types of brain tumors (i.e., meningioma, glioma, and pituitary tumor). The experimental results demonstrate that the mean average precision values of the proposed method range from 90.4% to 91.5% for different views (transverse, coronal, and sagittal) with an average value of 91.0%.

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems play a crucial role in managing the exponential growth of digital image collections. Their task is to retrieve relevant images by analysing the content of a query image rather than relying on metadata. The idea here is to extract relevant features from the query image and find a similar set of features in other images. The current generation of CBIR systems faces difficulties in bridging the “semantic gap” between image features at low levels and human perception at high levels which reduces retrieval precision. The research targets CBIR performance enhancement by developing state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for feature extraction. We implemented two approaches which included a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with six convolutional layers and a finetuned ResNet50 model trained on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and the finetuned model demonstrated better performance than numerous existing CBIR systems. The networks extracted 512-dimensional feature vectors from their penultimate layer for subsequent similarity-matching operations. The fine-tuned ResNet50 model delivered better retrieval results than our custom CNN model since it reached a Mean Average Precision (MAP) score of 98.7%, while the custom CNN achieved 87.3%. We built a web-based interface that allows users to perform real-time image retrieval through multiple evaluation metrics.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems use multiple image features to represent an image. These systems suffer from curse of dimensionality since a high-dimensional feature vectors are formed to represent images in the target dataset. Reduction in length of feature vector can speed-up the retrieval process, but it reduces the retrieval accuracy. To overcome the aforementioned problem, an efficient layer-wise feature incremental approach for the CBIR system has been proposed. The proposed approach uses three primitive image features namely color, texture, and shape. The retrieval process is accomplished in three layers, at first a layer-complete dataset is searched but only single-feature space is used. Top 10% of images most similar to query image are retained in the second layer. The second layer uses two features for similarity computation, and only 50% of the most similar images are passed to the third layer. Finally, the third layer uses all three features to compute the similarity. Our aim is to reduce the search space at subsequent layers and use multiple features for a reduced dataset at the final layer. The proposed approach is evaluated on four publicly available image datasets. The retrieval results on the basis of precision, recall, and f-score show the performance improvement in comparison to state-of-the-art CBIR systems.

This paper presents an image representation and matching framework for image categorization in medical image archives. Categorization enables one to determine automatically, based on the image content, the examined body region and imaging modality. It is a basic step in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems, the goal of which is to augment text-based search with visual information analysis. CBIR systems are currently being integrated with picture archiving and communication systems for increasing the overall search capabilities and tools available to radiologists. The proposed methodology is comprised of a continuous and probabilistic image representation scheme using Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM) along with information-theoretic image matching via the Kullback-Leibler (KL) measure. The GMM-KL framework is used for matching and categorizing X-ray images by body regions. A multidimensional feature space is used to represent the image input, including intensity, texture, and spatial information. Unsupervised clustering via the GMM is used to extract coherent regions in feature space that are then used in the matching process. A dominant characteristic of the radiological images is their poor contrast and large intensity variations. This presents a challenge to matching among the images, and is handled via an illumination-invariant representation. The GMM-KL framework is evaluated for image categorization and image retrieval on a dataset of 1500 radiological images. A classification rate of 97.5% was achieved. The classification results compare favorably with reported global and local representation schemes. Precision versus recall curves indicate a strong retrieval result as compared with other state-of-the-art retrieval techniques. Finally, category models are learned and results are presented for comparing images to learned category models.

The use of Computer-Aided Diagnosis in dermatology raises the necessity of integrating Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technologies. The latter could be helpful to untrained users as a decision support system for skin lesion diagnosis. However, classical CBIR systems perform poorly due to semantic gap. To alleviate this problem, we propose in this paper an intelligent Content-Based Dermoscopic Image Retrieval (CBDIR) system with Relevance Feedback (RF) for melanoma diagnosis that exhibits: efficient and accurate image retrieval as well as visual features extraction that is independent of any specific diagnostic method. After submitting a query image, the proposed system uses linear kernel-based active SVM, combined with histogram intersection-based similarity measure to retrieve the K most similar skin lesion images. The dominant (melanoma, benign) class in this set will be identified as the image query diagnosis. Extensive experiments conducted on our system using a 1097 image database show that the proposed scheme is more effective than CBDIR without the assistance of RF.

In recent years, with the development of digital image techniques and digital albums in the Internet, the use of digital image retrieval process has increased dramatically. An image retrieval system is a computer system for browsing, searching and retrieving images from large databases of digital images. In order to increase the accuracy of image retrieval, a content-based image retrieval system(CBIR) based on interactive genetic algorithm (IGA) is proposed. Color, texture and edge have been the primitive low level image descriptors in content based image retrieval systems. In this paper we proposed a system that splits the retrieval process into two stages. In the query stage, the feature descriptors of a query image were extracted and then used to evaluate the similarity between the query image and those images in the database. In the evolution stage, the most relevant images were retrieved by using the IGA. IGA is employed to help the users identify the images that are most satisfied to the users' need. The experimental evaluation of the system is based on a 10000 WANG color image database. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

With the rapid growing volume of images in medical databases, development of efficient image retrieval systems to retrieve relevant or similar images to a query image has become an active research area. Despite many efforts to improve the performance of techniques for accurate image retrieval, its success in biomedicine thus far has been quite limited. This article presents an adaptive content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system for improving the performance of image retrieval in mammographic databases. In this work, the authors propose a new relevance feedback approach based on incremental learning with support vector machine (SVM) regression. Also, the authors present a new local perturbation method to further improve the performance of the proposed relevance feedback system. The approaches enable efficient online learning by adapting the current trained model to changes prompted by the user's relevance feedback, avoiding the burden of retraining the CBIR system. To demonstrate the proposed image retrieval system, the authors used two mammogram data sets: A set of 76 mammograms scored based on geometrical similarity and a larger set of 200 mammograms scored by expert radiologists based on pathological findings. The experimental results show that the proposed relevance feedback strategy improves the retrieval precision for both data sets while achieving high efficiency compared to offline SVM. For the data set of 200 mammograms, the authors obtained an average precision of 0.48 and an area under the precision-recall curve of 0.79. In addition, using the same database, the authors achieved a high pathology matching rate greater than 80% between the query and the top retrieved images after relevance feedback. Using mammographic databases, the results demonstrate that the proposed approach is more accurate than the model without using relevance feedback not only in image retrieval but also in pathology matching while maintaining its effectiveness for online relevance feedback applications.

Radiologists are now confronted with the difficulty of interpreting cross-sectional studies composed of thousands of images. In hospitals, all acquired imaging data are stored in a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). To take advantage of these masses of previously interpreted images, with the ultimate goal to facilitate the diagnosis of new cases, a promising approach would be to integrate a Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system into PACS. CBIR system performances are inherently limited by the features considered to represent the images. The current state of the art for the extraction of visual features relies on deep learning which requires a sufficient amount of annotated data to learn a generalizable model, such annotated data being rare and difficult to use in medical imaging. At the same time, PACS contain additional information such as radiological reports which supplement visual information carried by the images. We study here how such semantic information, hidden in these reports, can be used to supervise the learning of neuronal models to build a better visual representation of images. In this context our contribution is threefold. We first adapted a contrastive learning approach, which is usually used to learn representation from pairs of positive images in an unsupervised manner, to deal with in-domain medical data. Second, to train such a model to be robust and generalizable with a sufficient amount of data, we propose to re-employ the "dormant" medical imaging literature. Finally, the visual features and the deep models learned in this way, can be considered in CBIR systems as coarse-grained information which can then be fine-tuned in PACS, with more specific images depending on the applications. The obtained experimental result with state of the art contrastive learning methods highlight the interest of this approach.