CVPR 2001 Short Course

 

Image Search Engines: Techniques and Applications

 

Instructors: Theo Gevers (University of Amsterdam) and Arnold Smeulders (University of Amsterdam)

 

MOTIVATION

 

Very large digital image archives have been created and used in a number of applications including archives of images of postal stamps, textile patterns, museum objects, trademarks and logos, and views from everyday life as it appears in home videos and consumer photography. Moreover, with the growth and popularity of the World Wide Web, a tremendous amount of visual information is made accessible publicly. As a consequence, there is a growing demand for search methods retrieving pictorial entities from large image archives. In this tutorial we will give a survey of the most recent developments on image search engines focusing on the following topics:

 

 

TOPICS

 

Color, Texture and Shape Features:

Color provides powerful information for image retrieval. A color survey is given consisting of an introduction to standard color models as well as an overview of best recent work on color invariance. Further, we analyze in detail which color models to use under which imaging parameters. This is useful for image retrieval applications where no constraints on the imaging process can be imposed as well as for applications where one or more parameters of the imaging process can be controlled. Further, an extensive overview is given of current shape features for image retrieval.

 

Searching:

In the field of pattern recognition, several methods have been proposed that improve classification automatically through experience such as artificial neural networks, decision tree learning, Bayesian learning and k-nearest neighbor classifiers. A survey is given on the most recent developments regarding the use of these classification techniques for image classification and retrieval.

 

Indexing:

Various methods have been developed for indexing the stored images so that the image retrieval methods can perform efficiently at some additional costs in memory, such as a k-d tree, R-tree or a X-tree, for example. A survey is given of indexing methods in the context of image retrieval.

 

Visualization:

Visualization of the feature matching results is very important and will be addressed in detail. Further, methods are discussed to localize object in images.

 

Relevance feedback:

From the user feed-back giving negative/positive answers, methods can automatically learn which image features are more important. Methods and systems are discussed using relevance feedback for image retrieval.

 

Survey of image retrieval system:

Finally, a survey of existing image retrieval systems is given. The systems are compared with respect to above discussed topics.

 

TELEPHONE, FAX NUMBERS AND EMAIL ADDRESSES:

 

Dr. Theo Gevers and Prof. Arnold W.M. Smeulders

University of Amsterdam

Faculty of Science

Intelligent Sensory Information Systems

Kruislaan 403

1098 SJ Amsterdam

tel. 020-5257463

fax. 020-5257490

gevers@wins.uva.nl

smeulders@wins.uva.nl

 

 

BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF BOTH AUTHORS:

 

Theo Gevers is assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His main research interests are in the fundamentals of image database system design, image retrieval by content, theoretical foundation of geometric and photometric invariants and color image processing. He has led several (inter)national projects and acts as a reviewer. He is co-organizer of the First International Workshop on Image Databases and Multi Media Search, the Third International Conference on Visual Information Systems and the First Dutch Workshop on Colour Imaging and Vision. He has published over 50 papers on color image processing, image retrieval and image database design.

 

Arnold W.M. Smeulders is professor of Computer Science in Multi Media Information Analysis. He has been in computer vision since 1975. He has published some 200 papers and an equal amount of conference contributions mostly on vision and recognition, with a new emphasis on multimedia analysis. He heads the Intelligent Sensory Information Systems group at the University of Amsterdam. His current research interest is in industrial vision from specification, colour vision, image search by pictorial example and image databases, intelligent interactive analysis, and system design aspects of multimedia systems, but he is mostly intrigued by the correspondence between language and picture. He is co-chair of IAPR's TC12 on Multi-Media, associate editor for IEEE-transactions PAMI and Cytometry, and a member of the Visual Information Systems steering committee. He is also director of the Research Institute Computer Science and department head of the University of Amsterdam, and director of the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam.

 

 

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