FEATURE EXTRACTION FOR LOCALIZED CBI
R
What You Click is What you Get
Steven Verstockt, Peter Lambert, and Rik Van de Walle
Department of Electronics and Information Systems – Multimedia Lab, Ghent University,
Gaston Crommenlaan 8, bus 201, B-9050 Ledeberg-Ghent, Belgium
Keywords: Object recognition, Feature extraction, Localized CBIR, Query by selection, SIFT.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of localized content based image retrieval. Contrary to classic CBIR
systems which rely upon a global view of the image, localized CBIR only focuses on the portion of the
image where the user is interested in, i.e. the relevant content. Using the proposed algorithm, it is possible to
recognize an object by clicking on it. The algorithm starts with an automatic gamma correction and bilateral
filtering. These pre-processing steps simplify the image segmentation. The segmentation itself uses dynamic
region growing, starting from the click position. Contrary to the majority of segmentation techniques, region
growing only focuses on that part of the image that contains the object. The remainder of the image is not
investigated. This simplifies the recognition process, speeds up the segmentation, and increases the quality
of the outcome. Following the region growing, the algorithm starts the recognition process, i.e., feature
extraction and matching. Based on our requirements and the reported robustness in many state-of-the-art
papers, the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) approach is used. Extensive experimentation of our
algorithm on three different datasets achieved a retrieval efficiency of approximately 80%.
1 INTRODUCTION
Content-based image retrieval has been a lively
discipline and fast advancing research area during
the past decade (Smeulders, 2000). CBIR systems
use visual content such as color, texture, and simple
shape properties to search images from large scale
image databases (Del Bimbo, 1999). Although they
improve text-based image retrieval systems, these
systems are not yet a commercial success. One of
the major reasons for this limited success is that
CBIR rely upon a global view of the image,
sometimes leading to a lot of irrelevant image
content that is used in the search process. A solution
for the global view problem can be found in
localized CBIR. These systems only focus on the
portion of the image the user is interested in.
The localized CBIR system described in this
paper uses an interactive click and search technology
to retrieve the relevant object. The proposed system
can be used in a wide spectrum of application areas
such as youtube-like video retrieval, search engines,
and interactive television.
The test case used in our work is interactive
advertising by logo recognition, i.e., a technique to
extract logos or logo-like objects in digital images,
so it can be used in a ‘what you click is what you
get’ functionality on iDTV.
The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 to 5 describes the major steps in
our logo recognition algorithm, i.e., logo extraction,
feature extraction, and matching. A scheme of this
algorithm is showed in Figure 1. Section 5 reports
on the performance results obtained from a set of
experiments on 3 different datasets. Finally, section
6 concludes the paper and points out directions for
future work.
Figure 1: Logo recognition algorithm.
373
Verstockt S., Lambert P. and Van De Walle R. (2009).
FEATURE EXTRACTION FOR LOCALIZED CBIR - What You Click is What you Get.
In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, pages 371-374
DOI: 10.5220/0001755703710374
Copyright
c
SciTePress
2 LOGO EXTRACTION
The first step in our logo recognition algorithm is
logo extraction. The logo extraction itself can be
further divided into five steps, as illustrated in
Figure 2. The first three steps, i.e., contrast stretch,
automatic gamma correction, and bilateral filtering,
pre-process the input image to improve the quality
of the subsequent steps in the logo extraction. Next,
a dynamic region growing process searches the logo
in the neighborhood of the click position. As soon as
the region growing finishes, the algorithm makes an
image crop, i.e., the result of our logo extraction.
Figure 2: Logo extraction by region growing.
Automatic gamma correction
Since logo extraction works on all kinds of images,
gamma correction needs to calculate a different
gamma value for each individual image. To
automatically generate an appropriate value we
created an automatic gamma correction. This
correction starts with an RGB to HSL color space
conversion. Using the histogram of the HSL
lightness component, our algorithm computes the
mean and standard deviation of the lightness
component. Based on these values the algorithm
computes the gamma value using (Eq. 1).
Bilateral filtering
Noise makes logo extraction more difficult. Many
solutions, i.e., filters, exist in literature to remove
image noise. However the majority of these filters
have the undesirable side-effect of blurring the
edges. For region growing these edges are very
important and must be easily distinguishable.
Bilateral filtering prevents averaging across
edges, while still averaging within smooth regions. It
is a non-linear filtering technique introduced by
(Tomasi and Manduchi, 1998). It extends the
concept of Gaussian smoothing by weighting the
Gaussian filter coefficients with their corresponding
relative pixel intensities, i.e., combining gray levels
or colors based on their geometric closeness and
their photometric similarity.
Dynamic region growing
Since the proposed pre-processing operates on the
global image, and, standard region growing grows
unbounded, the computational cost can become very
high and the retrieved image crop is sometimes too
big to find a unique match. Dynamic region growing
solves these problems since it investigates only a
small part of the image, i.e., a 100 by 100 pixel area
centered at the click position. If this small image
crop contains enough information to retrieve a
unique match, the dynamic region growing finishes.
Otherwise the pixel area is extended and the logo
extraction restarts.
3 FEATURE EXTRACTION
Many algorithms exist to recognize logo-like
objects, e.g., global features, shape description- &
matching techniques, and local features (invariant to
transformations and variations). Based on our results
and on studies comparing recognition techniques
(Veltkamp, 2001), local features seem to perform
best for solving real-life image matching problems.
Local feature-based image matching is usually
done in two steps. The first step is the feature
detection, i.e., keypoint or interest point detection.
The second step involves computing descriptors for
each detected interest point. These descriptors are
then used for matching keypoints of the input image
with keypoints in the logo database.
During the last decade, a lot of different
detectors and descriptors have been proposed in
literature (Mikolajczyk et al., 2004). For logo
recognition the descriptor should be distinctive and
at the same time robust to changes in viewing
conditions. The feature should also be resilient to
changes in illumination, image noise, uniform
scaling, rotation, and minor changes in viewing
direction. The descriptor should also minimize the
probability of mismatch and finally, it should also be
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relatively easy and fast to extract the features and
compare them against a large database of local
features. Based on these requirements and the
reported robustness in other research projects, Scale
Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is used. A
detailed description of SIFT can be found in the
work of (Lowe, 2004).
4 FEATURE MATCHING
After generation of keypoint descriptors each of the
resulting descriptors is compared with the keypoint
descriptors in the logo database. The keypoint with
minimum Euclidean distance, i.e., the closest
neighbor, is selected in the database. However, this
candidate is not necessarily matched because many
features from an image may not have any correct
match in the training database. For this reason the
ratio of the distance with the closest neighbor and
the distance with the second closest neighbor is
computed. The match is rejected if this ratio exceeds
the experimentally determined threshold of 0.6.
Once comparison of descriptors is performed the
database image with maximum number of matches
is returned as recognized image.
When logo colors in the input image differ too
much with colors of the corresponding logo in the
database, feature matching fails. Proposed solutions
in literature for making SIFT more invariant for
background and color changes are color invariant
CSIFT and Shape-SIFT (Abdel-Hakim and Farag,
2006). Although both methods seem to produce
acceptable results, a much simpler method giving
similar results is used. If no match can be found the
image crop is inverted, the SIFT descriptors for the
negative image crop are calculated, and, the
matching restarts.
5 EVALUATION
The datasets used in the evaluation are obtained
from three different sources: Caltech standard
gadgets dataset, flickr.com dataset of top 5 relevant
images for each of the 20 most famous advertisers in
Flanders in 2008, and, real-life city pics taken with a
mobile phone. Each image is annotated with 3 click
positions per visible logo and for each of these click
positions the region and the name of the logo that
should be retrieved is specified. This forms the
ground truth.
The evaluation uses two criterions: region
coverage (Eq. 2) and retrieval efficiency (Eq. 3).
Region coverage is used to measure the efficiency of
dynamic region growing. Retrieval efficiency, i.e., a
common measure for evaluating CBIR systems
(Müller et al., 2001), is used to evaluate the outcome
of the WYCIWYG system, i.e., the strongness of the
proposed localized CBIR.
The first experiment consists of determining the
region growing thresholds and measuring the
influence of four different pre-processing
techniques: none, median filtering, bilateral filtering,
and fast bilateral filtering (Paris and Durand, 2006).
The efficiency is measured by the region coverage
between the retrieved region and the region
described in the ground truth.
As can be seen in Graph 1, bilateral and fast
bilateral filtering perform best. For optimal
thresholds the region coverage of the bilateral filter
exceeds 0.7, while without pre-processing the region
growing only achieves a maximum coverage of 0.58.
Graph 1: Region growing.
In the second test we measure the effect of the
pre-processing on the retrieval efficiency of the
whole system. During this test feature matching
thresholds are varied to retrieve optimal values.
This test is not only covered for SIFT, but also
the efficiency of SURF, i.e., speeded up robust
features, is subject of this evaluation. SURF is a
SIFT-like local feature descriptor introduced by
(Bay et al., 2006) which has a similar performance
as SIFT for classic CBIR. Graph 2 shows the
retrieval efficiency of SIFT. Using optimal
thresholds and the bilateral filter SIFT reaches a
retrieval efficiency of approximately 80%. As can be
seen in Graph 3 SURF’s retrieval efficiency is much
(2)
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FEATURE EXTRACTION FOR LOCALIZED CBIR-What You Click is What you Get
375
lower than the retrieval efficiency of SIFT. A reason
for this can be found in the fact that the number of
retrieved SURF feature vectors for the logo crops is
sometimes too limited to find a match. Although for
classic CBIR SIFT and SURF have a similar
performance, SIFT improves SURF in our approach.
Graph 2: Retrieval efficiency of SIFT.
Graph 3: Retrieval efficiency of SURF.
6 CONCLUSIONS
An efficient localized content based image retrieval
system has been developed to recognize logos and
logo-like objects in digital images. The building
blocks of the underlying algorithm are pre-
processing by bilateral filtering, dynamic region
growing, and, SIFT feature extraction and matching.
WYCIWYG achieves a retrieval efficiency of
approximately 80% over all the datasets. Using the
proposed algorithm, it is possible to recognize a logo
by clicking on it, as is illustrated in Figure 3. Even
clicking in the neighborhood of the logo is sufficient
to do successful logo retrieval.
W
YCIWYG is implemented using MATLAB.
Depending on the image size and the logo
characteristics the average execution time is
approximately 10 seconds on a Pentium M 740 with
a default clock speed of 1.73 GHz. The memory
usage is rather high, but 1GB should be sufficient.
Further investigation will be carried out to accelerate
the recognition process and decrease the memory
usage.
Figure 3: WYCIWYG demo.
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