Content-Based Image Retrieval with Combined Features: Color and Gradient

Feature extraction is fundamental stage of effective content based image retrieval (CBIR). However, it remains challenging issue to extract low-level features for retrieval systems. This paper puts forward an effective solution proposal for the aforementioned problem. Initially, images and their gradients are clustered with multi-level thresholding. A codebook is generated with threshold values. The size of the codebook generated depends on the number of thresholds. Consequently, every pixel in color image is included in a cluster by means of the codebook. Color reduction is performed by assigning the average values of pixels in the same cluster. A cluster-based one-dimensional histogram (CBH) is created with the numbers of pixels in every cluster represented with a single color. Then the cluster-based feature vectors with histogram are extracted from original image and gradient image. Accordingly, relevant features are combined. The developed feature vector is called as combined feature vector (CFV). The most important advantages of CFV are that it performs an effective color reduction technique and feature presentation by processing texture information with gradient operator. Therefore, the main contribution of the combined feature vector suggested is its high accuracy and stability for image retrieval. The proposed method has been tested with Corel-1K, Corel-5K Corel-10K and GHIM-10K datasets. In addition, performances of different image histogram similarity techniques such as cosine, histogram intersection and Euclidean distance have been verified with the developed algorithm. Experimental results have been analyzed in two categories. Initially, CBIR results produced with combined feature vectors which are generated by Otsu, Kapur and center of gravity of histogram (CGH) procedures have been evaluated. Then, the CBIR strategy based on CGH method has been compared with CBIR systems with local binary pattern (LBP) and gradient-structures histogram (GSH). It was observed that CBIR approach based on CGH technique has significantly outperformed.

Biometric for Cattle Identification using Muzzle Patterns

Similar to human biometrics such as faces and fingerprints, animals also have biometrics for individual identifiers. This research paper works on biometrics of cattle using images of muzzle patterns. The proposed approach begins with a training process to construct a cattle face localization model using a Haar feature-based cascade classifier. Then, the watershed technique is applied to segment a region of interest (RoI) of a muzzle area in the detected region of the cattle face. This muzzle ROI is further enhanced to make ridge lines more outstanding. The next step, using two approaches, is to extract a main feature descriptor based on a bag of histograms of oriented gradients (BoHoG) and a histogram of local binary patterns (LBP). Then, the support vector machine (SVM) is applied with the histogram intersection kernel for a final cattle identifier. The proposed method is evaluated using five different datasets including one existing cattle dataset used in previous research works, one newly collected dataset of swamp buffalo captured in a controlled environment, and three newly collected datasets of swamp buffalo captured in an outdoor field environment. This outdoor field environment includes challenges of freely moving cattle and differences in daylight. It could achieve a promising accuracy of 95% for a large dataset of 431 subjects.

A Novel Adaptive Pixel Retaining Approach for Robust Watermarking Using Histogram Intersection Technique

Imperceptibility criterion as, the host image is intellectual property that the owners want to protect. It should be visually the increased usage of digitized data for communication leads to the high demand in the copyright protection of the data. This proposed watermarking technique helps to highly improve the capacity of embedding watermark without affecting the imperceptibility and robustness. The approach couples the idea of building analysis rule in generating the watermark, thereby increasing the capacity of embedding watermark. The approach is additionally guided with Histogram Intersection technique to improve the confidentiality of watermark. The APRA (Adaptive Pixel Retaining Approach) Algorithm helps to improve the imperceptibility of the extracted watermark. Watermark is embedded in host image by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The APRA Algorithm helps to rebuild the extracted watermark in such a way that it remains close to the original watermark. With the available dataset, the experiments are performed and obtained results shows that the proposed watermarking technique yields watermarked images with high imperceptibility and robustness to common attacks.

Intelligent Content-Based Dermoscopic Image Retrieval with Relevance Feedback for Computer-Aided Melanoma Diagnosis

The use of Computer-Aided Diagnosis in dermatology raises the necessity of integrating Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) technologies. The latter could be helpful to untrained users as a decision support system for skin lesion diagnosis. However, classical CBIR systems perform poorly due to semantic gap. To alleviate this problem, we propose in this paper an intelligent Content-Based Dermoscopic Image Retrieval (CBDIR) system with Relevance Feedback (RF) for melanoma diagnosis that exhibits: efficient and accurate image retrieval as well as visual features extraction that is independent of any specific diagnostic method. After submitting a query image, the proposed system uses linear kernel-based active SVM, combined with histogram intersection-based similarity measure to retrieve the K most similar skin lesion images. The dominant (melanoma, benign) class in this set will be identified as the image query diagnosis. Extensive experiments conducted on our system using a 1097 image database show that the proposed scheme is more effective than CBDIR without the assistance of RF.