A Novel Image Retrieval Strategy Based on VPD and Depth with Pre-Processing

Author

Tianyang Wang, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

8-1-2015

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Mogharreban, Namdar

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a comprehensive working flow for image retrieval. It contains four components: denoising, restoration, color features extraction, and depth feature extraction. We propose a visual perceptual descriptor (VPD) to extract color features from an image. Gradient direction is calculated at each pixel, and the VPD is moved over the entire image to locate regions with similar gradient direction. Color features are extracted only at these pixels. Experiments demonstrate that VPD is an effective and reliable descriptor in image retrieval. We propose a novel depth feature for image retrieval. Regarding any 2D image as the convolution of a corresponding sharp image and a Gaussian kernel with unknown blur amount. Sparse depth map is computed as the absolute difference of the original image and its sharp version. Depth feature is extracted as the nuclear norm of the sparse depth map. Experiments validate the effectiveness of this approach on depth recovery and image retrieval. We present a model for image denoising. A gradient item is incorporated, and can be merged into the original model based on geometric measure theory. Experiments illustrate this model is effective for image denoising, and it can improve the retrieval performance by denoising a query image. A model is proposed for image restoration. It is an extension of the traditional singular value thresholding (SVT) algorithm, addressing the issue that SVT cannot recover a matrix with missing rows or columns. Proposed is a way to fill such rows and columns, and then apply SVT to restore the damaged image. The pre-filled entries are recomputed by averaging its neighboring pixels. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this model on image restoration, and it can improve the retrieval performance by restoring a damaged query image. Finally, the capability of this working flow is tested. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in image retrieval.