Content based image retrieval (CBIR) has become a popular area of research for both computer vision and multimedia communities. It aims at organizing digital picture archives by analyzing their visual contents. CBIR techniques make use of these visual contents to retrieve in response to any particular query. Note that this differs from traditional retrieval systems based on keywords to search images. Due to widespread variations in the images of standard image databases, achieving high precision and recall for retrieval remains a challenging task. In the recent past, many CBIR algorithms have applied Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) for modeling the visual contents of images. Though BoVW has emerged as a popular image content descriptor, it has some important limitations which can in turn adversely affect the retrieval performance. Image retrieval has many applications in diverse fields including healthcare, biometrics, digital libraries, historical research and many more (da Silva Torres and Falcao, 2006). In the retrieval system, two kinds of approaches are mainly followed, namely, Text-Based Image Retrieval (TBIR) and Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). The former approach requires a lot of hu- man effort, and time and perception. Content based image retrieval is a technique that enables an user to extract similar images based on a query from a database containing large number of images.The basic issue in designing a CBIR system is to select the image features that best represent the image content in a database. As a part of a CBIR system, one has to apply appropriate visual content descriptors to represent these images. A query image should be represented similarly. Then, based on some measures of similarity, a set of images would be retrieved from the avail- able image database. The relevance feedback part, which incorporates inputs from a user, can be an optional block in a CBIR system. The fundamental problem in CBIR is how to transform the visual contents into distinctive features for dissimilar images, and into similar features for images that look alike. BoVW has emerged as a popular model for representing the visual content of an image in the recent past. It tries to bridge the gap between low level visual features and high-level semantic features to some extent.

The book describes several techniques used to bridge the semantic gap and reflects on recent advancements in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). It presents insights into and the theoretical foundation of various essential concepts related to image searches, together with examples of natural and texture image types. The book discusses key challenges and research topics in the context of image retrieval, and provides descriptions of various image databases used in research studies. The area of image retrieval, and especially content-based image retrieval (CBIR), is a very exciting one, both for research and for commercial applications. The book explains the low-level features that can be extracted from an image (such as color, texture, shape) and several techniques used to successfully bridge the semantic gap in image retrieval, making it a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the area of CBIR alike.

What is Content Based Image Retrieval Content-based image retrieval, also known as query by image content and content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR), is the application of computer vision techniques to the problem of image retrieval, which is the difficulty of searching for digital images in big databases. Other names for this technique include content-based visual information retriev. In contrast to the conventional concept-based methods, content-based picture retrieval is a more recent development. How you will benefit (I) Insights, and validations about the following topics: Chapter 1: Content-based image retrieval Chapter 2: Information retrieval Chapter 3: Image retrieval Chapter 4: Automatic image annotation Chapter 5: Tag cloud Chapter 6: Video search engine Chapter 7: Image organizer Chapter 8: Image meta search Chapter 9: Reverse image search Chapter 10: Visual search engine (II) Answering the public top questions about content based image retrieval. (III) Real world examples for the usage of content based image retrieval in many fields. Who this book is for Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Content Based Image Retrieval.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support, MCBR-CBS 2011, held in Toronto, Canada, in September 2011. The 11 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 submissions. The papers are divided on several topics on medical image retrieval with textual approaches, visual word based approaches, applications and multidimensional retrieval.

Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval addresses the basic concepts and techniques for designing content-based image and video retrieval systems. It also discusses a variety of design choices for the key components of these systems. This book gives a comprehensive survey of the content-based image retrieval systems, including several content-based video retrieval systems. The survey includes both research and commercial content-based retrieval systems. Content-Based Image And Video Retrieval includes pointers to two hundred representative bibliographic references on this field, ranging from survey papers to descriptions of recent work in the area, entire books and more than seventy websites. Finally, the book presents a detailed case study of designing MUSE–a content-based image retrieval system developed at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Content-based image retrieval is the set of techniques for retrieving relevant images from an image database on the basis of automatically derived image features. The need for efficient content-based image re trieval has increased tremendously in many application areas such as biomedicine, the military, commerce, education, and Web image clas sification and searching. In the biomedical domain, content-based im age retrieval can be used in patient digital libraries, clinical diagnosis, searching of 2-D electrophoresis gels, and pathology slides. I started my work on content-based image retrieval in 1995 when I was with Stanford University. The project was initiated by the Stan ford University Libraries and later funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal was to design and implement a computer system capable of indexing and retrieving large collections of digitized multimedia data available in the libraries based on the media contents. At the time, it seemed reasonable to me that I should discover the solution to the image retrieval problem during the project. Experi ence has certainly demonstrated how far we are as yet from solving this basic problem.

Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) ist ein Verfahren zum Auffinden von Bildern in großen Datenbanken wie z. B. dem Internet anhand ihres Inhalts. Ausgehend von einem vom Nutzer bereitgestellten Anfragebild, gibt das System eine sortierte Liste ähnlicher Bilder zurück. Der Großteil moderner CBIR-Systeme vergleicht Bilder ausschließlich anhand ihrer visuellen Ähnlichkeit, d.h. dem Vorhandensein ähnlicher Texturen, Farbkompositionen etc. Jedoch impliziert visuelle Ähnlichkeit nicht zwangsläufig auch semantische Ähnlichkeit. Zum Beispiel können Bilder von Schmetterlingen und Raupen als ähnlich betrachtet werden, weil sich die Raupe irgendwann in einen Schmetterling verwandelt. Optisch haben sie jedoch nicht viel gemeinsam. Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt eine Methode vor, welche solch menschliches Vorwissen über die Semantik der Welt in Deep-Learning-Verfahren integriert. Als Quelle für dieses Wissen dienen Taxonomien, die für eine Vielzahl von Domänen verfügbar sind und hierarchische Beziehungen zwischen Konzepten kodieren (z.B., ein Pudel ist ein Hund ist ein Tier etc.). Diese hierarchiebasierten semantischen Bildmerkmale verbessern die semantische Konsistenz der CBIR-Ergebnisse im Vergleich zu herkömmlichen Repräsentationen und Merkmalen erheblich. Darüber hinaus werden drei verschiedene Mechanismen für interaktives Image Retrieval präsentiert, welche die den Anfragebildern inhärente semantische Ambiguität durch Einbezug von Benutzerfeedback auflösen. Eine der vorgeschlagenen Methoden reduziert das erforderliche Feedback mithilfe von Clustering auf einen einzigen Klick, während eine andere den Nutzer kontinuierlich involviert, indem das System aktiv nach Feedback zu denjenigen Bildern fragt, von denen der größte Erkenntnisgewinn bezüglich des Relevanzmodells erwartet wird. Die dritte Methode ermöglicht dem Benutzer die Auswahl besonders interessanter Bildbereiche zur Fokussierung der Ergebnisse. Diese Techniken liefern bereits nach wenigen Feedbackrunden deutlich relevantere Ergebnisse, was die Gesamtmenge der abgerufenen Bilder reduziert, die der Benutzer überprüfen muss, um relevante Bilder zu finden. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) aims for finding images in large databases such as the internet based on their content. Given an exemplary query image provided by the user, the retrieval system provides a ranked list of similar images. Most contemporary CBIR systems compare images solely by means of their visual similarity, i.e., the occurrence of similar textures and the composition of colors. However, visual similarity does not necessarily coincide with semantic similarity. For example, images of butterflies and caterpillars can be considered as similar, because the caterpillar turns into a butterfly at some point in time. Visually, however, they do not have much in common. In this work, we propose to integrate such human prior knowledge about the semantics of the world into deep learning techniques. Class hierarchies serve as a source for this knowledge, which are readily available for a plethora of domains and encode is-a relationships (e.g., a poodle is a dog is an animal etc.). Our hierarchy-based semantic embeddings improve the semantic consistency of CBIR results substantially compared to conventional image representations and features. We furthermore present three different mechanisms for interactive image retrieval by incorporating user feedback to resolve the inherent semantic ambiguity present in the query image. One of the proposed methods reduces the required user feedback to a single click using clustering, while another keeps the human in the loop by actively asking for feedback regarding those images which are expected to improve the relevance model the most. The third method allows the user to select particularly interesting regions in images. These techniques yield more relevant results after a few rounds of feedback, which reduces the total amount of retrieved images the user needs to inspect to find relevant ones.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the first MICCAI Workshop on Medical Content-Based Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support, MCBR_CBS 2009, held in London, UK, in September 2009. The 10 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are divide on several topics on medical image retrieval, clinical decision making and multimodal fusion.

What is Image Retrieval An image retrieval system is a computer system used for browsing, searching and retrieving images from a large database of digital images. Most traditional and common methods of image retrieval utilize some method of adding metadata such as captioning, keywords, title or descriptions to the images so that retrieval can be performed over the annotation words. Manual image annotation is time-consuming, laborious and expensive; to address this, there has been a large amount of research done on automatic image annotation. Additionally, the increase in social web applications and the semantic web have inspired the development of several web-based image annotation tools. How you will benefit (I) Insights, and validations about the following topics: Chapter 1: Image retrieval Chapter 2: Information retrieval Chapter 3: Content-based image retrieval Chapter 4: Automatic image annotation Chapter 5: Google Images Chapter 6: Image meta-search Chapter 7: Visual search engine Chapter 8: Reverse image search Chapter 9: TinEye Chapter 10: Image collection exploration (II) Answering the public top questions about image retrieval. (III) Real world examples for the usage of image retrieval in many fields. Who this book is for Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Image Retrieval.

Present day applications require various kinds of images and pictures as a source of information for interpretation and analysis .Recently, digital content has become a significant and inevitable asset for any enterprise and the need for visual content management is on the rise as well. There has been an increase in attention towards the automated management and retrieval of digital images owing to the drastic development in the number and size of image databases. A significant and increasingly popular approach that aids in the retrieval of image data from a huge collection is called Content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Content-based image retrieval has attracted voluminous research in the last decade paving way for development of numerous techniques and systems besides creating interest on fields that support these systems. CBIR indexes the images based on the features obtained from visual content so as to facilitate speedy retrieval. This report discusses the state of the art of the content based image retrieval highlighting the main components and reviewing various approaches of CBIR focusing on efficiency of retrieval.