Towards developing effective CBIR systems using Contourlet

Transform

Introduction
Growth in large collection of images has been drastically increasing owing to the
availability of cheaper storage devices, fast computers & communication technologies,
internet access of databases, and much more. Retrieving of images most efficiently from
such large collection, based on their content, has become an important research issue for
database, image processing and computer vision communities [1]. A technique named
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) [2, 3, 4, 5] is used for extracting similar images
from an image database. In CBIR, Content-based" means that, the search that analyzes
the actual contents of the image, and the term 'content' refers to colors, shapes, textures,
or any other information that can be derived from the image itself. The most challenging
feature of CBIR technique is to viaduct the gap between low-level feature layout and
high-level semantic concepts [6]. The CBIR consists of the following two steps for
searching the images from the database: 1.) a feature vector is computed and stored in a
feature database for each image in the database, 2.) in a given query image, the feature
vector is compared to the feature vectors of the image database and images which are
most similar to the query image are returned to the user. The features and measures used
for comparing two feature vectors must be highly efficient to match similar images [9].

CBIR has been extensively applied in advertising, medicine, crime detection,

entertainment, and digital libraries. [7]. In CBIR applications, the user typically provides
an image (or a set of images) with no indication of which portion of the image is of
interest. Thus a search in classical CBIR often relies upon a global view of the image [6].
However, designing of CBIR system with these objectives becomes difficult as the size
of image database increases. CBIR based on color, texture, shape, and edge information
are available in the literature [8]. Indeed, content-based image retrieval exploits primitive
visual features that humans use to analyze and understand the content of the image, thus
reducing the cognitive effort of the user in accessing the database and retrieving results
that better match user's expectation [10].

To capture the local characteristics of an image, many CBIR systems either subdivide the
image into fixed blocks, or more commonly partition the image into different meaningful
regions by applying a segmentation algorithm. In both the cases, each region of the image
is represented as a feature vector of feature values extracted from the region. Other CBIR
systems extract salient points (also known as interest points), which are locations in an
image where there is a significant variation with respect to a chosen image feature [6].

In CBIR systems, the retrieval of the appropriate images for the provided uncertain image
is carried out by comparing the characteristics of the uncertain image and the images in
the database. So, the characteristics of the image must have a strong correlation with
semantic meaning of the image. Relevant images are retrieved according to minimum
distance or maximum similarity [19] measure calculated between feature of query image
and every image in the image data base [8].

Motivation of the research

Copious number of researches has been carried out on image retrieval resulting in various
approaches and technique used to retrieve images. Currently, the two main approaches to
image retrieval are low-level image retrieval commonly known as content based image
retrieval (CBIR), and high-level image retrieval based on text retrieval of images using
image annotations [11]. Low-level image retrieval is based on the use of an integrated
feature extraction/ object-recognition subsystem that automates the process of feature-
extraction and object-recognition. This process is based on analysis of the low-level
image features color, texture, location and/or shape to index images and later retrieve
images based on similarity [12]. During the past decade, a remarkable progress has been
made in both theoretical research and development of the CBIR system. However, there
remain many challenging research problems that continue to attract researchers from
multiple disciplines [13]. Literature presents a number of researches that have made use
of various methods for content based image retrieval with the available records. Of them,
a handful of important contributions are given below which have in relation to the
proposed concept.

Iker Gondra and Douglas R. Heisterkamp [14] have attempted to bypass the feature
selection step (and the metric in the corresponding feature space) by following what they
believed was the logical continuation of the CBIR idea of searching visual content
directly. It was based on the observation that, since ultimately, the entire visual content of
an image was encoded into its raw data (i.e., the raw pixel values), in theory, it should be
possible to determine image similarity based on the raw data alone. The main advantage
of this approach was its simplicity in that explicit selection, extraction, and weighting of
features was not needed. Their work was an investigation into an image dissimilarity
measure following the theoretical foundation of the recently proposed normalized
information distance (NID). Approximations of the Kolmogorov complexity of an image
were created by using different compression techniques. Using those approximations, the
NID between images was calculated and used as a metric for CBIR. The compression-
based approximations to Kolmogorov complexity were shown to be valid by proving that
they create statistically significant dissimilarity measures by testing them against a null
hypothesis of random retrieval. Furthermore, when compared against several feature-
based methods, the NID approach performed surprisingly well.

Hong Chang and Dit-Yan Yeung [15] have proposed a kernel approach to improve the
retrieval performance of CBIR systems by learning a distance metric based on pairwise
constraints between images as supervisory information. Unlike most existing metric
learning methods which learn a Mahalanobis metric corresponding to performing linear
transformation in the original image space, they defined the transformation in the kernel-
induced feature space which is nonlinearly related to the image space. Experiments
performed on two real-world image databases showed that their method not only
improved the retrieval performance of Euclidean distance without distance learning, but it
also outperformed other distance learning methods significantly due to its higher
flexibility in metric learning.

Thomas M. Lehmann et al. [16] have evaluated automatic categorization into more than
80 categories describing the imaging modality and direction as well as the body part and
biological system examined. Based on 6231 reference images from hospital routine,
85.5% correctness was obtained combining global texture features with scaled images.
With a frequency of 97.7%, the correct class was within the best ten matches, which was
sufficient for medical CBIR applications.

Djemel Ziou et al. [17] have proposed a probabilistic framework for efficient retrieval
and indexing of image collections. This framework uncovered the hierarchical structure
underlying the collection from image features based on a hybrid model that combines
both generative and discriminative learning. They adopted the generalized Dirichlet
mixture and maximum likelihood for the generative learning in order to estimate
accurately the statistical model of the data. Then, the resulting model was refined by a
new discriminative likelihood that enhances the power of relevant features.
Consequently, this new model was suitable for modeling high-dimensional data described
by both semantic and low-level (visual) features. The semantic features were defined
according to a known ontology while visual features represent the visual appearance such
as color, shape, and texture. For validation purposes, they proposed a new visual feature
which has nice invariance properties to image transformations. Experiments on the
Microsoft's collection (MSRCID) showed clearly the merits of the approach in both
retrieval and indexing.

A two-level description (TLD) describes images by a rough description and a detailed

description to avoid improper spatial constraint caused by OLD was proposed by Sheng-
Yang Dai and Yu-Jin Zhang [18]. Similarity measurement based on unbalanced region
matching (URM) was introduced to take advantage of TLD to reduce the influence of
segmentation. A novel spatial descriptor integrating shape, size, and density as well as
position and spatial layout information together was also proposed. The performance of
the integrated system was illustrated by experimental results with 1000 query images
randomly selected from a database of 10,000 general-purpose images.

Problem and the Proposed Solution

Wavelet and Fourier transformations are the most commonly used transformation
techniques for image retrieval. They offer multiscale and time-frequency localization of
an image. These representations are not effective in representing the image regions that
are separated by smooth contours. So, an alternative is essential for the time-frequency
localization of the images. Previous researches have shown that the Contourlet Transform
(CT) offers an effective solution for time-frequency localization of images with smooth
contours. The primary objective of my work is to propose a CBIR system for efficient
image retrieval based on its color, texture and spatial features using CT. Image retrieval
based on its color is the most successfully used technique as it is the most important
feature influencing the local visual recognition and discrimination. Moreover,
incorporating the texture and spatial information of an image with the color features can
make the system more effective. Since the images are likely to contain smooth contours,
the proposed system will employ CT for extracting the aforesaid features from the image.
The principal reason behind the usage of CT is, because of its two significant properties;
directionality and anisotropy. The proposed system will effectively retrieve images from
the database based on the features extracted by CT.

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