초록 ▼

Apparatus and an accompanying method for generating a semantically based, linguistically searchable, numeric descriptor of a pre-defined group of input images and which is particularly useful in a system for automatically classifying individual images, on a numerical basis, in, e.g., an image databa

Apparatus and an accompanying method for generating a semantically based, linguistically searchable, numeric descriptor of a pre-defined group of input images and which is particularly useful in a system for automatically classifying individual images, on a numerical basis, in, e.g., an image database, and, through a query-by-example paradigm, retrieving a desired image(s) therefrom. Specifically, a signature is computed for each image in a set using multi-level iterative convolution filtering, with pixel values supplied as input to each filtering level being separately convolved with each one of a set of predefined Gaussian kernels. Average and variance vectors, as collective numeric descriptors of all the images in the set, are separately computed across corresponding elements in all the image signatures for the set. A linguistic term, semantically descriptive of all the images in the set, is associated with the numeric descriptors of this set and, with this set, is stored in a database. For image retrieval, the descriptor for any set is accessed by a textual search through the database using the appropriate linguistic term. The descriptor is then compared against accessed signatures for other images in the database in order to retrieve a image, among those stored in the database, that is the most similar to those in the set associated with the descriptor.

대표청구항 ▼

[ I claim:] [1.] A system, responsive to a query image set, for retrieving, from a stored database, a desired image that is visually similar to the image set, said set containing at least one query image, said system comprising:an image database having stored images therein;a signature generator, re

[ I claim:] [1.] A system, responsive to a query image set, for retrieving, from a stored database, a desired image that is visually similar to the image set, said set containing at least one query image, said system comprising:an image database having stored images therein;a signature generator, responsive to an input image and having three successive convolution filters, for producing a signature for the input image, the signature containing a numeric measure of each of a plurality of pre-defined characteristics of the input image; wherein the signature generator, in response to the query image set, generates a corresponding signature for each image in the query image set, and, in response to a test image accessed from the stored database, generates a corresponding test signature;a statistics generator, responsive to the signature for each image in the query image set, for providing a separate pre-defined statistical measure, for each of the pre-defined characteristics, that represents variability of said each pre-defined characteristic across all images in the query image set;a image database manager, operative in conjunction with the image database, for retrieving successive ones of a plurality of stored images from the database and for routing each one of the plurality of successive images as the test image to the signature generator so as to generate a plurality of corresponding test signatures;a comparator for comparing, across all of the pre-defined characteristics, the statistical measure for each of the pre-defined characteristics against a corresponding numeric measure in each one of the test signatures so as to yield a similarity measure, the similarity measure for said one of the test images being reflective of a degree of visual similarity between the one test image and the query image set; anda manager, responsive to the similarity measure for each of the test images and operative in conjunction with the image database manager, for selecting at least one of the test images having a highest relative similarity measure as a retrieved image and providing the retrieved image as output.