International Journal of Image and Graphics

The Hausdorff distance (HD) between planar sets of points is known to be an effective measure for determining the degree of resemblance between binary images. In this paper, we analyze the conventional HD measure and propose a new Robust HD (RHD) measure. The proposed RHD measure takes into account not only the location information of the edge points, but also other factors such as the total number of the edge points whose nearest neighbors are within a specified directed distance, spurious edge segments defined by a small number of points, outliers, and occlusions. Experimental results for both synthetic and real images show that the proposed RHD measure is more efficient than the conventional HD measure.

We propose a new shape-based, query-by-example, image database retrieval method that is able to match a query image to one of the images in the database, based on a whole or partial match. The proposed method has two key components: the architecture of the retrieval and the features used. Both play a role in the overall retrieval efficacy. The proposed architecture is based on the analysis of connected components and holes in the query and database images. The features we propose to use are geometric in nature, and are invariant to translation, rotation and scale. Each of the suggested three features is not new per se, but combining them to produce a compact and efficient feature vector is. We use hand-sketched, rotated and scaled query images to test the proposed method using a database of 500 logo images. We compare the performance of the suggested features with the performance of the moment invariants (a set of commonly-used shape features). The suggested features match the moment invariants in rotated and scaled queries and consistently surpass them in hand-sketched queries. Moreover, results clearly show that the proposed architecture significantly increases the performance of the two feature sets.

Since the BSP tree algorithm was introduced, many extended or applied algorithms for the original BSP tree algorithm have been reported. Most of the previous work dealt with polygons that are components of polyhedra. If a scene consists of many polyhedra and they are allowed to move, the management cost of a BSP tree becomes expensive and the size of the tree becomes large. This paper presents an object-oriented BSP tree algorithm that can more efficiently deal with a large number of moving polyhedra.

View specific distortions of a 3D model according to its reference drawings are required for cartoon animations. Rademacher introduced a technique called View-Dependent Geometry wherein a 3D view-dependent model changes shape based on the viewing direction. The main problem in constructing a view-dependent model is of deforming the 3D base model according to its reference drawings. In this paper, we propose an automatic method for solving this problem based on a projective camera model. We present results demonstrating our approach.

We present an edge preserving regularization scheme for the restoration of degraded images compressed by the lossy compression method based on Generalized Finite Automata edge encoding and the Iterative Constrained Least Square Regularization technique. In this scheme, the degraded image reconstructed from lossy image compressions is treated as the input to the image restoration process. The edge information extracted from the source image is utilized as a priori knowledge for the subsequent reconstruction. In order to compromise the overall bit rate incurred by the additional edge information, a generalized finite automata encoding technique is adopted to encode the bit-planes of the edge image. The generalized finite automata method ensures an efficient and adaptive image-independent encoding of the edge image. The experiment has shown that the proposed scheme could significantly improve both the objective and subjective quality of the reconstructed image over that of the set partitioning in hierarchical trees by recovering more image details and edge structures under the same bit rates.

Image engineering is a discipline that includes image processing, image analysis, image understanding, and the applications of these techniques. To promote its development and evolvement, this paper provides a well-regulated explanation of the definition of image engineering, as well as its intention and extension. It also introduces a new classification of the theories of image engineering, and the applications of image technology. A thorough statistical survey on the publications in this discipline is carried out, and an analysis and discussion of the statistics from the classification results are presented. This work shows a general and an up-to-date picture of the status, progress, trends and application areas of image engineering.

The paper describes a system and technology for the automatic/interactive interpretation of color maps. Due to the fact that a completely automatic solution is impossible, a combination of automatic and interactive techniques is used. Firstly, color recognition and separation is performed. For automatic map vectorization, a special fast scheme is used. To make digitization more automatic and user-friendly, an interactive digitizing mode has been developed to extract line-based cartographic objects from vectorised data. The system has a powerful and friendly user interface that is described in the paper. The system is used successfully in the digitization of topographic and other types of map.

This paper presents a new approach to smart sensor system design for real-time remote sensing. A combination of techniques for image analysis and image compression is investigated. The proposed algorithms include: (1) a fractional discrimination function for image analysis, (2) a comparison of effective algorithms for image compression, (3) a pipeline architecture for parallel image classification and compression on-board satellites, and (4) a task control strategy for mapping image computing models to hardware processing elements. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed techniques are demonstrated throughout system simulation.