Conference Paper

A New Edge Intersection-Based Salient Points Extraction and its Application in Computer Vision

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Thesis
This research introduces an image retrieval system which is, in different ways, inspired by the human vision system. The main problems with existing machine vision systems and image understanding are studied and identified, in order to design a system that relies on human image understanding. The main improvement of the developed system is that it uses the human attention principles in the process of image contents identification. Human attention shall be represented by saliency extraction algorithms, which extract the salient regions or in other words, the regions of interest. This work presents a new approach for the saliency identification which relies on the irregularity of the region. Irregularity is clearly defined and measuring tools developed. These measures are derived from the formality and variation of the region with respect to the surrounding regions. Both local and global saliency have been studied and appropriate algorithms were developed based on the local and global irregularity defined in this work. The need for suitable automatic clustering techniques motivate us to study the available clustering techniques and to development of a technique that is suitable for salient points clustering. Based on the fact that humans usually look at the surrounding region of the gaze point, an agglomerative clustering technique is developed utilising the principles of blobs extraction and intersection. Automatic thresholding was needed in different stages of the system development. Therefore, a Fuzzy thresholding technique was developed. Evaluation methods of saliency region extraction have been studied and analysed; subsequently we have developed evaluation techniques based on the extracted regions (or points) and compared them with the ground truth data. The proposed algorithms were tested against standard datasets and compared with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms. Both quantitative and qualitative benchmarking are presented in this thesis and a detailed discussion for the results has been included. The benchmarking showed promising results in different algorithms. The developed algorithms have been utilised in designing an integrated saliency-based image retrieval system which uses the salient regions to give a description for the scene. The system auto-labels the objects in the image by identifying the salient objects and gives labels based on the knowledge database contents. In addition, the system identifies the unimportant part of the image (background) to give a full description for the scene.
Article
Image segmentation is one of the most important techniques in image processing. It is widely used in different applications such as computer vision, digital pattern recognition, robot vision, etc. Histogram was the earliest feature that has been used for isolating objects from their background, it is widely applicable in different application in which one needs to divide the image into distinct regions like background and object. The thresholding technique is the most popular solution in which a value on the histogram is selected to separate the regions. This value, which is known as the threshold, should be specified in an appropriate way. One of the methods is by using the global minimum value of the histogram and divides the histogram into white and black (binary image). Due to the spatial and grey uncertainty and ambiguity, the extraction of the threshold value in a crispy way is not suitable always. To overcome such problems, the proposed method uses two membership functions to measure the whiteness and blackness of a member element. The pixel belonging to one of the region is dependent on the membership value it has according to the membership functions.