This paper addresses the problem of semantic-based image retrieval of natural scenes. A typical content-based image retrieval system deals with the query image and images in the dataset as a collection of low-level features and retrieves a ranked list of images based on the similarities between features of the query image and features of images in the image dataset. However, top ranked images in the retrieved list, which have high similarities to the query image, may be different from the query image in terms of the semantic interpretation of the user which is known as the semantic gap. In order to reduce the semantic gap, this paper investigates how natural scene retrieval can be performed using the bag of visual word model and the distribution of local semantic concepts. The paper studies the efficiency of using different approaches for representing the semantic information, depicted in natural scene images, for image retrieval. An extensive experimental work has been conducted to study the efficiency of using semantic information as well as the bag of visual words model for natural and urban scene image retrieval.
The problem of image annotation has gained increasing attention from many researchers in computer vision. Few works have addressed the use of bag of visual words for scene annotation at region level. The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between the distribution of local semantic concepts and local keypoints located in image regions labelled with these semantic concepts. Based on this study, we investigate whether bag of visual words model can be used to efficiently represent the content of natural scene image regions, so images can be annotated with local semantic concepts. Also, this paper presents local from global approach which study the influence of using visual vocabularies generated from general scene categories to build bag of visual words at region level. Extensive experiments are conducted over a natural scene dataset with six categories. The reported results have shown the plausibility of using the BOW model to represent the semantic information of image regions.
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