Descriptor Trends in Texture Classification for Material Recognition

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.

Image retrieval is one of the most interesting and fastest growing research areas in all fields. It is an effective and efficient tool for managing large image databases. In most Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems, an image is represented by a set of low-level visual features; hence a direct correlation with high-level semantic information will be absent. Therefore, a gap exists between high-level information and low-level features, which is the main reason that hinders the improvement of the image retrieval accuracy. In this work, main focus is on the semantic based image retrieval system using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) for texture feature extraction. Based on the texture features, semantic interpretations are given to the extracted textures. The images are retrieved according to user satisfaction and thereby reduce the semantic gap between low level features and high level features.

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.

Content based image retrieval systems (CBIR) are used to search images on the basis of their visual content in a huge image database. This approach uses a multi-clustering technique with a multi-searching process. In addition it integrate, Mean SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) descriptor as local feature and HSV(hue, saturation, value) histogram as global feature. Our proposition aims to a maximum separation of the execution to gain time and keep the performance of each descriptor. Local and global features are combined for more relevant results. Getting several views to relevant results to cover the subjectivity in displaying results. This article, detailed our proposed method with a comparison with the FIRE (Flexible Image Retrieval) Engine and LIRE (Lucene Image Retrieval). The results demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of our proposition.

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) depends on the visual content of an image for obtaining similar images. Research on CBIR faces a challenge of semantic gap between low level features and high level visual content. The optimal solution must reduce the computational complexity and computational time in retrieval process. Relevance Feedback is a solution to reduce the semantic gap. A new framework for content based image retrieval is proposed which is Bipartite Reiterative algorithm. This gives an approach of iteration to relevance feedback mechanism. It consists of two levels which are basic retrieval scheme and reiterative feedback scheme. Positive images are obtained from the user as part of the basic retrieval scheme. New feedback algorithm is developed based on weights assigned to visual attributes. The weights are inversely proportional to the visual attribute distance between query image and the positive images given by the user. Iterative feedback query can be performed after the user feedback. The query will be progressed according to the user feedback. The algorithm reduces the computational complexity and computational time in image retrieval.

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has certain advantages over those pure keyword-based. CBIR indexes images by visual features that are extracted from the images. This may save the effort spent on the manual annotation. However, because low-level visual features, such as colour and texture, often carry no high-level concepts, images retrieved purely based on content may not match with the intention of the user. The work presented in this paper is an image retrieval system that bases both on text annotations and visual contents. It indexes and retrieves images by both keywords and visual features, with the purpose that the keywords may mend the gap between the semantic meaning an image carries and its visual content. Tests were made on the system that have demonstrated that such a hybrid approach did improve retrieval precisions over those pure content-based.

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), a set of low-level features are extracted from an image to represent its visual content. Retrieval is performed by image example where a query image is given as input by the user and an appropriate similarity measure is used to find the best matches in the corresponding feature space. This approach suffers from the fact that there is a large discrepancy between the low-level visual features that one can extract from an image and the semantic interpretation of the image’s content that a particular user may have in a given situation. That is, users seek semantic similarity, but we can only provide similarity based on low-level visual features extracted from the raw pixel data, a situation known as the semantic gap. The selection of an appropriate similarity measure is thus an important problem. Since visual content can be represented by different attributes, the combination and importance of each set of features varies according to the user’s semantic intent. Thus, the retrieval strategy should be adaptive so that it can accommodate the preferences of different users. Relevance feedback (RF) learning has been proposed as a technique aimed at reducing the semantic gap. It works by gathering semantic information from user interaction. Based on the user’s feedback on the retrieval results, the retrieval scheme is adjusted. By providing an image similarity measure under human perception, RF learning can be seen as a form of supervised learning that finds relations between high-level semantic interpretations and low-level visual properties. That is, the feedback obtained within a single query session is used to personalize the retrieval strategy and thus enhance retrieval performance. In this chapter we present an overview of CBIR and related work on RF learning. We also present our own previous work on a RF learning-based probabilistic region relevance learning algorithm for automatically estimating the importance of each region in an image based on the user’s semantic intent.

Due to the advancements in digital technologies and social networking, image collections are growing exponentially. The important aim in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is to reduce the semantic gap issue that improves the performance of image retrieval. In this paper, the objective is achieved by introducing effective visual words fusion technique based on speeded-up robust features (SURF) and histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) feature descriptors. HOG is used to extract global features, whereas SURF is used for the extraction of local features. Global features are preferred for large-scale image retrieval, whereas local features perform better on those systems that support semantic queries with close visual appearance. Moreover, SURF is scale and rotation-invariant as compared to HOG descriptor and it works better for low illumination. On the contrary, HOG performs better for scene-recognition- or activity-recognition-based applications. In the proposed technique, visual words fusion of SURF and HOG feature descriptors is carried which performed better than features fusion of SURF and HOG feature descriptors as well as state-of-the-art CBIR techniques. The proposed technique based on visual words fusion gives classification accuracy of 98.40% using support vector machine while image retrieval accuracy of 80.61%. Qualitative and quantitative analyses performed on four standard image collections namely, Corel-1000, Corel-1500, Corel-5000, and Caltech-256 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique based on visual words fusion of SURF and HOG feature descriptors.

In order to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems, the 'semantic gap' between the low-level visual features and the high-level semantic features attracts more and more research interest. We propose an approach to describe and to extract the fuzzy color semantics. According to human color perception model, we utilize the linguistic variable to describe the image color semantics, so it becomes possible to depict the image in linguistic expression such as mostly red. Furthermore, we apply the feedforward neural network to model the vagueness of human color perception and to extract the fuzzy semantic feature vector. Our experiments show that the color semantic features have good accordance with the human perception, and also have good retrieval performance. In some extent, our approach shows the potential to reduce the semantic gap in CBIR.

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has become a critical technology for efficiently searching and retrieving images from large datasets based on their visual content. Traditional CBIR systems, which rely on low-level features like color, texture, and shape, often struggle with semantic gaps and scalability issues. With the rapid advancements in deep learning and cloud computing, there is a growing need to enhance CBIR performance for real-world applications. In order to tackle the issues, an enhanced CBIR process leveraging advanced neural networks, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Siamese Networks, and attention mechanisms is proposed. It integrates multimodal data, including text and audio, to improve retrieval accuracy. Additionally, cloud-based infrastructure is employed to support large-scale image processing, enabling faster retrieval times and real-time performance. Edge computing techniques are also incorporated to reduce latency in applications requiring immediate responses. The proposed model demonstrates significant improvements in retrieval accuracy and efficiency compared to traditional CBIR methods. Deep learning models, particularly CNNs with transfer learning and attention mechanisms, effectively capture high-level semantic features. The integration of cloud infrastructure enhances scalability and real-time processing capabilities, while multimodal retrieval improves search relevance. The use of explainable AI techniques adds transparency to the decision-making process, increasing user trust. Hence, the advanced neural networks, coupled with cloud and edge computing, can significantly optimize CBIR systems, making them more robust, scalable, and applicable to a wide range of industries such as healthcare, security, and e-commerce.

In a Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system, images are retrieved based on the content of the images such as color, shapes and objects. However, often end users experience a semantic gap between the notion of similarity used by the ranking model versus the users’ perception about image similarity. Explainable AI (XAI) is an emerging research field that attempts to provide transparency of “black box” models, to make AI systems trustworthy and gain user trust. This work aims at building an I mage R etrieval system with T extual EX planations such as “The (global) results are similar to the query by X% due to shape, Y% due to color”. Local explanations are generated using various methods such as comparing images with respect to overlap between low level features such as color, shape and regions (MPEG-7 features). Additionally, high level features such as background-foreground segmentation, deep learned features and major key-points, objects identified (SIFT features) are used to enrich the explanations. We evaluate the quality of rankings on benchmark data-sets such as PASCAL VOC. The XAI facet of user satisfaction and usefulness of the system is evaluated in a lab based user study. Our results show that the semantic gap is better bridged using high level features. While low level features might be better suited for re-ranking of the retrieved images.

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is an extrusive technique of retrieving the relevant images from vast image archives by extracting their low level features. In this research paper, the pursuance of five most prominent texture feature extraction techniques used in CBIR systems are experimentally compared in detail. The main issue with the CBIR systems is the proper selection of techniques for the extraction of low level features which comprises of color, texture and shape. Among these features, texture is one of the most decisive and dominant features. This selection of features completely depends upon the type of images to be retrieved from the database. The texture techniques explored here are Grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), Discrete wavelet transform (DWT), Gabor transform, Curvelet and Local binary pattern (LBP). These are experimented on three touchstone databases which are Wang, Corel-5 K and Corel-10 K. The chief parameters of CBIR systems are evaluated here such as precision, recall and F-measure on all these databases using all the techniques. After detailed investigation it is figured out that LBP, GLCM and DWT provide highlighted and comparable results in all these datasets in terms of average precision. Besides practical implementation, the precised conceptual examination of these three texture techniques is also proposed in this article. So, this analysis is extremely beneficial for selecting the appropriate feature extraction technique by taking into consideration the experimental results along with image conditions such as noise, rotation etc.

With the recent evolution of technology, the number of image archives has increased exponentially. In Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), high-level visual information is represented in the form of low-level features. The semantic gap between the low-level features and the high-level image concepts is an open research problem. In this paper, we present a novel visual words integration of Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). The two local features representations are selected for image retrieval because SIFT is more robust to the change in scale and rotation, while SURF is robust to changes in illumination. The visual words integration of SIFT and SURF adds the robustness of both features to image retrieval. The qualitative and quantitative comparisons conducted on Corel-1000, Corel-1500, Corel-2000, Oliva and Torralba and Ground Truth image benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed visual words integration.

The accuracy of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems is significantly affected by the discriminatory power of image features and distance measures. This paper performs an investigation towards finding the best local and global features and distance measures for content-based image retrieval. It provides insights into the trade-offs regarding computational costs, memory utilization and accuracy on several standard datasets which include MIRFLICKR, Corel, Holidays and ZuBuD. First, low-dimensional global and local features are extracted individually to generate a bank of small image features. Second, multilevel descriptor forms are utilized to produce highly discriminative image representations based on multi-features aggregation scheme. The relationship is highlighted between features (local and global) and other retrieval factors such as quantization approaches, visual codebooks, distance measures, vectorization methods, memory and retrieval speed. The resulting composite image representations are compact, i.e., only 32–64 vector dimension and 32–128 codebook size, and preserve high discriminative levels which further boost the retrieval accuracy and performance. The experimental results show that the presented multi-features image representations are efficient and outperform many competitive methods of the state-of-the-art.

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.