Watershed-Driven Region-Based Image Retrieval

This paper presents a strategy for content-based image retrieval. It is based on a meaningful segmentation procedure that can provide proper distributions for matching via the Earth mover’s distance as a similarity metric. The segmentation procedure is based on a hierarchical watershed-driven algorithm that extracts automatically meaningful regions. In this framework, the proposed robust feature extraction plays a major role along with a novel region weighting for enhancing feature discrimination. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed strategy.

[1]  Laurent Najman,et al.  Geodesic Saliency of Watershed Contours and Hierarchical Segmentation , 1996, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[2]  Hayit Greenspan,et al.  Context-dependent segmentation and matching in image databases , 2004, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[3]  Carlo Tomasi,et al.  Perceptual metrics for image database navigation , 1999 .

[4]  Chiou-Shann Fuh,et al.  Hierarchical color image region segmentation for content-based image retrieval system , 2000, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[5]  B. S. Manjunath,et al.  NeTra: A toolbox for navigating large image databases , 1997, Multimedia Systems.

[6]  B. S. Manjunath,et al.  Unsupervised Segmentation of Color-Texture Regions in Images and Video , 2001, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[7]  D.M. Mount,et al.  An Efficient k-Means Clustering Algorithm: Analysis and Implementation , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[8]  James Ze Wang,et al.  SIMPLIcity: Semantics-Sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture LIbraries , 2001, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[9]  Hichem Sahli,et al.  Multiscale gradient watersheds of color images , 2003, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[10]  Theo Gevers.  Image segmentation and similarity of color-texture objects , 2002, IEEE Trans. Multim..

[11]  Ioannis Pratikakis,et al.  Automatic Watershed Segmentation of Color Images , 2000, ISMM.

[12]  Hichem Sahli,et al.  Hierarchical segmentation via a diffusion scheme in color/texture feature space , 2003, Proceedings 2003 International Conference on Image Processing (Cat. No.03CH37429).

[13]  W. Eric L. Grimson,et al.  Spatial template extraction for image retrieval by region matching , 2003, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[14]  Bo Zhang,et al.  An efficient and effective region-based image retrieval framework , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[15]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Blobworld: Image Segmentation Using Expectation-Maximization and Its Application to Image Querying , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..