The typical content-based image retrieval problem is to find images within a database that are similar to a given query image. This paper presents a solution to a different problem, namely that of content based sub-image retrieval, i.e., finding images from a database that contains another image. Note that this is different from finding a region in a (segmented) image that is similar to another image region given as a query. We present a technique for CBsIR that explores relevance feedback, i.e., the user's input on intermediary results, in order to improve retrieval efficiency. Upon modeling images as a set of overlapping and recursive tiles, we use a tile re-weighting scheme that assigns penalties to each tile of the database images and updates the tile penalties for all relevant images retrieved at each iteration using both the relevant and irrelevant images identified by the user. Each tile is modeled by means of its color content using a compact but very efficient method which can, indirectly, capture some notion of texture as well, despite the fact that only color information is maintained. Performance evaluation on a largely heterogeneous dataset of over 10,000 images shows that the system can achieve a stable average recall value of 70 within the top 20 retrieved (and presented) images after only 5 iterations, with each such iteration taking about 2 seconds on an off-the-shelf desktop computer.
An straigthforward way to model images is to use its average color. This is obviously not effective in any non-trivial situation. Another simple, and in many situations cost-effective means is to use a global color histogram (GCH) (c.f., @cite_14 ). A common critique to GCHs is that it is unable to capture any notion of spatial distribution. To address this several other approaches have been proposed A comprehensive survey thereof is beyond the scope of this paper. , but they add complexity as a trade-off in order to gain effectiveness. Nevertheless, the use of color only, without any notion of spatial distribution, may be effective, if one is able to capture other features of the images, e.g., texture. That is exactly the advantage of the BIC technique proposed in @cite_0 and which we re-use within our proposal.
@cite_0 @cite_14
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We present new methods which transfer the color style of a source image into an arbitrary given target image having a different 3D color distribution. The color transfer has a high importance ensuring a wide area of applications from artistic transformation of the color atmosphere of images until different scientific visualizations using special gamut mappings. Our technique use a permissive, or optionally strict, 3D histogram matching, similarly to the sampling of multivariable functions applying a sequential chain of conditional probability density functions. We work by order of hue, hue dependent lightness and from both dependent saturation histograms of source and target images, respectively. We apply different histogram transformations, like smoothing or contrast limitation, in order to avoid some unexpected high gradients and other artifacts. Furthermore, we use dominance suppression optionally, by applying sub-linear functions for the histograms in order to get well balanced color distributions, or an overall appearance reflecting the memory color distribution better. Forward and inverse operations on the corresponding cumulative histograms ensure a continuous mapping of perceptual attributes correlating to limited derivatives. Sampling an appropriate fraction of the pixels and using perceptually accurate and continuous histograms with minimal size as well as other gems make this method robust and fast. In this paper, we present a color consistency technique in order to make images in the same collection share the same color style and to avoid gamut problems. Some previous methods define simple global parameter-based models and use optimizing algorithms to obtain the unknown parameters, which usually cause gamut problems in bright and dark regions. Our method is based on the range-preserving histogram specification and can enforce images to share the same color style, without resulting in gamut problems. We divide the input images into two sets having respectively high visual quality and low visual quality. The high visual quality images are used to make color balance. And then the low visual quality images are color transferred using the previous corrected high quality images. Our experiments indicate that such histogram-based color correction method is better than the compared algorithm. We proposed a computational visual saliency modeling technique. The proposed technique makes use of a color co-occurrence histogram (CCH) that captures not only "how many" but also "where and how" image pixels are composed into a visually perceivable image. Hence the CCH encodes image saliency information that is usually perceived as the discontinuity between an image region or object and its surrounding. The proposed technique has a number of distinctive characteristics: It is fast, discriminative, tolerant to image scale variation, and involves minimal parameter tuning. Experiments over benchmarking datasets show that it predicts fixational eye tracking points accurately and a superior AUC of 71.25 is obtained. A novel color image histogram equalization approach is proposed that exploits the correlation between color components and it is enhanced by a multi-level smoothing technique borrowed from statistical language engineering. Multi-level smoothing aims at dealing efficiently with the problem of unseen color values, either considered independently or in combination with others. It is applied here to the HSI color space for the probability of intensity and the probability of saturation given the intensity, while the hue is left unchanged. Moreover, the proposed approach is extended by an empirical technique, which is based on a hue preserving non-linear transformation, in order to eliminate the gamut problem. This is the second method proposed in the paper. The equalized images by the two methods are compared to those produced by other well-known methods. The better quality of the images equalized by the proposed methods is judged in terms of their visual appeal and objective figures of merit, such as the entropy and the Kullback-Leibler divergence estimates between the resulting color histogram and the multivariate uniform probability density function.