We present an unsupervised method for discovering compound image structures that are comprised of simpler primitive objects. An initial segmentation step produces image regions with homogeneous spectral content. Then, the segmentation is translated into a relational graph structure whose nodes correspond to the regions and the edges represent the relationships between these regions. We assume that the region objects that appear together frequently can be considered as strongly related. This relation is modeled using the transition frequencies between neighboring regions, and the significant relations are found as the modes of a probability distribution estimated using the features of these transitions. Experiments using an Ikonos image show that subgraphs found within the graph representing the whole image correspond to parts of different high-level compound structures.
We describe a new image representation using spatial relationship histograms that extend our earlier work on modeling image content using attributed relational graphs. These histograms are constructed by classifying the regions in an image, computing the topological and distance-based spatial relationships between these regions, and counting the number of times different groups of regions are observed in the image. We also describe a selection algorithm that produces very compact representations by identifying the distinguishing region groups that are frequently found in a particular class of scenes but rarely exist in others. Experiments using Ikonos scenes illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed representation in retrieval of images containing complex types of scenes such as dense and sparse urban areas.
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