Semantics-sensitive Integrated Matching for Picture Libraries
and Biomedical Image Databases
James Z. Wang
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract:
The need for efficient content-based image retrieval has increased
tremendously in many application areas such as biomedicine, military,
commerce, education, and Web image classification and searching. In
the biomedical domain, content-based image retrieval can be used in
patient digital libraries, clinical diagnosis, searching of 2-D
electrophoresis gels, and pathology slides. In this thesis, we
present a wavelet-based approach for feature extraction, combined with
integrated region matching. An image in the database, or a portion of
an image, is represented by a set of regions, roughly corresponding to
objects, which are characterized by color, texture, shape, and
location. A measure for the overall similarity between images is
developed as a region-matching scheme that integrates properties of
all the regions in the images. The advantage of using such a ``soft
matching'' is that it makes the metric robust to poor segmentation, an
important property that previous work has not solved. An experimental
image retrieval system, SIMPLIcity (Semantics-sensitive Integrated
Matching for Picture LIbraries), has been built to validate these
methods on various image databases, including a database of about
200,000 general-purpose images and a database of more than 70,000
pathology image fragments. We have shown that our methods perform
much better and much faster than existing methods. The system is
exceptionally robust to image alterations such as intensity variation,
sharpness variation, intentional distortions, cropping, shifting, and
rotation. These features are important to biomedical image databases
because visual features in the query image are not exactly the same as
the visual features in the images in the database. The work has also
been applied to the classification of on-line images and web sites.
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Copyright James Z. Wang, 2000.
Last Modified:
August 4, 2000
© 2000