Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

Query processing issues in region-based image databases

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
Knowledge and Information Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Many modern image database systems adopt a region-based paradigm, in which images are segmented into homogeneous regions in order to improve the retrieval accuracy. With respect to the case where images are dealt with as a whole, this leads to some peculiar query processing issues that have not been investigated so far in an integrated way. Thus, it is currently hard to understand how the different alternatives for implementing the region-based image retrieval model might impact on performance. In this paper, we analyze in detail such issues, in particular the type of matching between regions (either one-to-one or many-to-many). Then, we propose a novel ranking model, based on the concept of Skyline, as an alternative to the usual one based on aggregation functions and k-Nearest Neighbors queries. We also discuss how different query types can be efficiently supported. For all the considered scenarios we detail efficient index-based algorithms that are provably correct. Extensive experimental analysis shows, among other things, that: (1) the 1–1 matching type has to be preferred to the N–M one in terms of efficiency, whereas the two have comparable effectiveness, (2) indexing regions rather than images performs much better, and (3) the novel Skyline ranking model is consistently the most efficient one, even if this sometimes comes at the price of a reduced effectiveness.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles and news from researchers in related subjects, suggested using machine learning.

References

  1. Ardizzoni S, Bartolini I, Patella M (1999) Windsurf: region-based image retrieval using wavelets. In: Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on similarity search (IWOSS’99). IEEE Computer Society, Florence, pp 167–173

  2. Bartolini I, Ciaccia P (2007) Imagination: exploiting link analysis for accurate image annotation. In: Revised selected papers from the 5th international workshop on adaptive multimedial retrieval (AMR 2007). Lecture notes in computer science, vol 4918. Springer, Paris, pp 32–44

  3. Bartolini I, Ciaccia P, Ntoutsi I, Patella M, Theodoridis Y (2009) The Panda framework for comparing patterns. Data Knowl Eng 68(2): 244–260

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Bartolini I, Ciaccia P, Oria V, Özsu T (2007) Flexible integration of multimedia sub-queries with qualitative preferences. Multimed Tools Appl 33(3): 275–300

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Bartolini I, Ciaccia P, Patella M (2000) A sound algorithm for region-based image retrieval using an index. In: Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on query processing and multimedia issues in distributed systems (QPMIDS 2000), London, UK, pp 930–934

  6. Bartolini I, Zhang Z, Papadias D (2009) Collaborative filtering with personalized skylines (revision)

  7. Börzsönyi S, Kossmann D, Stocker K (2001) The Skyline operator. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2001). IEEE Computer Society, Heidelberg, pp 421–430

  8. Carson C, Belongie S, Greenspan H, Malik J (2002) Blobworld: image segmentation using expectation-maximization and its application to image querying. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 24(8): 1026–1038

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Chávez E, Navarro G, Baeza-Yates R, Marroquín JL (2001) Proximity searching in metric spaces. ACM Comput Surv 33(3): 273–321

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Chiang T-W, Tsai T (2008) Querying color images using user-specified wavelet features. Knowl Inf Syst 15(1): 109–129

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  11. Chomicki J (2003) Preference formulas in relational queries. ACM Trans Database Syst 28(4): 427–466

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Ciaccia P, Patella M (2002) Searching in metric spaces with user-defined and approximate distances. ACM Trans Database Syst 27(4): 398–437

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Ciaccia P, Patella M, Zezula P (1997) M-tree: an efficient access method for similarity search in metric spaces. In: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on very large data bases (VLDB’97). Morgan Kaufmann, Athens, pp 426–435

  14. Fishburn P (1999) Preference structures and their numerical representations. Theor Comput Sci 217(2): 359–383

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Gaede V, Günther O (1998) Multidimensional access methods. ACM Comput Surv 30(2): 170–231

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Gong Z, Liu Q (2008) Improving keyword based web image search with visual feature distribution and term expansion. Knowl Inf Syst (to appear)

  17. Greenspan H, Dvir G, Rubner Y (2000) Region correspondence for image matching via EMD flow. In: Proceedings of the IEEE workshop on content-based access of image and video libraries (CBAIVL’00). IEEE Computer Society, New Orleans, pp 27–31

  18. Guttman A (1984) R-trees: A dynamic index structure for spatial searching. In: Proceedings of the 1984 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data. ACM Press, Boston, pp 47–57

  19. Hjaltason GR, Samet H (1999) Distance browsing in spatial databases. ACM Trans Database Syst 24(2): 265–318

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Hjaltason GR, Samet H (2003) Index-driven similarity search in metric spaces. ACM Trans Database Syst 28(4): 517–580

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Ilyas IF, Beskales G, Soliman MA (2008) A survey of top-k query processing techniques in relational database systems. ACM Comput Surv 40(4)

  22. Jing F, Li M, Zhang H-J, Zhang B (2004) An efficient and effective region-based image retrieval framework. IEEE Trans Image Process 13(5): 699–709

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Kailath T (1967) The divergence and Bhattacharyya distance measures in signal selection. IEEE Trans Commun Technol 15(1): 52–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Krichel T (2007) Information retrieval performance measures for a current awareness report composition aid. Inf Process Manag 43(4): 1030–1043

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Kuhn HW (1955) The Hungarian method for the assignment problem. Naval Res Logist Q 2: 83–97

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Lew MS, Sebe N, Djeraba C, Jain R (2006) Content-based multimedia information retrieval: state of the art and challenges. ACM Trans Multimed Comput Commun Appl 2(1): 1–19

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Liu Y, Zhang D, Lu G, Ma W-Y (2007) A survey of content-based image retrieval with high-level semantics. Pattern Recognit 40(1): 262–282

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  28. Lowe DG (1999) Object recognition from local scale-invariant features. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Vision. IEEE Computer Society, Kerkyra, pp 1150–1157

  29. Lucchese L, Mitra SK (2001) Color image segmentation: a state-of-the-art survey. Proc Indian Natl Sci Acad (INSA-A) 67(2): 207–221

    Google Scholar 

  30. Lv Q, Charikar M, Li K (2004) Image similarity search with compact data structures. In: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM CIKM international conference on information and knowledge management. ACM Press, Washington, DC, pp 208–217

  31. Ma W-Y, Manjunath BS (1999) NeTra: a toolbox for navigating large image databases. Multimed Syst 7(3):184–198. http://vision.ece.ucsb.edu/netra/

    Google Scholar 

  32. Natsev A, Rastogi R, Shim K (2004) WALRUS: a similarity retrieval algorithm for image databases. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 16(3): 301–316

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Pan J-Y, Yang H-J, Faloutsos C, Duygulu P (2004) Automatic multimedia cross-modal correlation discovery. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM Press, Seattle, pp 653–658

  34. Papadias D, Karacapilidis NI, Arkoumanis D (1999) Processing fuzzy spatial queries: a configuration similarity approach. Int J Geogr Inf Sci 13(2): 93–118

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Patella M, Ciaccia P (2009) Approximate similarity search: a multi-faceted problem. J Discrete Algorithm 7(1): 36–48

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  36. Rubner Y, Tomasi C (2000) Perceptual metrics for image database navigation. Kluwer, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  37. Salton G (1989) Automatic text processing: the transformation, analysis, and retrieval of information by computer. Addison-Wesley, Reading

    Google Scholar 

  38. Shakhnarovich G, Darrell T, Indyk P (2006) Nearest-neighbors methods in learning and vision. Theory and practice. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  39. Smeulders AWM, Worring M, Santini S, Gupta A, Jain R (2000) Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 22(12): 1349–1380

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Smith JR, Chang S-F (1996) VisualSEEk: a fully automated content-based image query system. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM international conference on multimedia. ACM Press, Boston, pp 87–98. http://www.ctr.columbia.edu/VisualSEEk

  41. Stehling RO, Nascimento MA, Falcão AX (2003) Cell histograms versus color histograms for image representation and retrieval. Knowl Inf Syst 5(3): 315–336

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Stricker M, Orengo M (1995) Similarity of color images. In: Storage and retrieval for image and video databases SPIE, vol 2420, San Jose, pp 381–392

  43. Swain MJ, Ballard DH (1991) Color indexing. Int J Comput Vis 7(1): 11–32

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Tao Y, Papadias D (2006) Maintaining sliding window skylines on data streams. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 18(2): 377–391

    Google Scholar 

  45. Wang JZ, Li J, Wiederhold G (2001) SIMPLIcity: semantics-sensitive integrated matching for picture libraries. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 23(9): 947–963

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Wang JZ, Wiederhold G, Firschein O, Wei SX (1997) Wavelet-based image indexing techniques with partial sketch retrieval capability. In: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE forum on research and technology advances in digital libraries (ADL’97), Washington, DC, pp 13–24

  47. Weber R, Mlivoncic M (2003) Efficient region-based image retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM CIKM international conference on information and knowledge management. ACM Press, New Orleans, pp 69–76

  48. Yuan Y, Lin X, Liu Q, Wang W, Yu JX, Zhang Q (2005) Efficient computation of the skyline cube. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2005). Trondheim, Norway, pp 241–252

  49. Zhang J, Marszałek M, Lazebnik S, Schmid C (2007) Local features and kernels for classification of texture and object categories: a comprehensive study. Int J Comput Vis 73(2): 213–238

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DEIS, Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Ilaria Bartolini, Paolo Ciaccia & Marco Patella

Authors
  1. Ilaria Bartolini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Paolo Ciaccia
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Marco Patella
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Patella.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Bartolini, I., Ciaccia, P. & Patella, M. Query processing issues in region-based image databases. Knowl Inf Syst 25, 389–420 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-009-0257-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-009-0257-4

Keywords

Profiles

  1. Ilaria Bartolini View author profile